On Friday, the government filed this statement of the facts in its memorandum in support of its motion for summary judgment in a civil rights and Privacy Act lawsuit brought by Dr. Steve Hatfill.

The anthrax attacks occurred in October 2001. Public officials, prominent members of the media, and ordinary citizens were targeted by this first bio-terrorist attack on American soil. Twenty-two persons were infected with anthrax; five died. At least 17 public buildings were contaminated. The attacks wreaked havoc on the U.S. postal system and disrupted government and commerce, resulting in economic losses estimated to exceed one billion dollars. The attacks spread anxiety throughout the nation  already in a heightened state of alert in the wake of the attacks of September 11  and left behind a lasting sense of vulnerability to future acts of bioterrorism. Given the unprecedented nature of the attacks, the investigation received intense media attention. Journalists from virtually every news organization pursued the story, sometimes conducting their own worldwide investigation to determine the person or persons responsible for the attacks and the motive behind them.

A. Journalistic Interest In Hatfill That Predates Alleged Disclosures

Testimony has revealed that at least certain members of the media began focusing their attention upon Hatfill in early 2002 because of tips they had received from former colleagues of his who found him to be highly suspicious. Articles about Hatfill thus began to appear in the mainstream press and on internet sites as early as January of 2002, and continued until the first search of his apartment on June 25, 2002, which, in turn, led to even more intense press attention.

Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a Professor at the State University of New York, for example, complained in January and February 2002 on the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) website of the FBIs apparent lack of progress on the investigation, and described generally the person she believed was the anthrax perpetrator. Analysis of Anthrax Attacks, Possible Portrait of the Anthrax Perpetrator (Section IV.6), Defendants Appendix , Ex. 1. Rosenberg did not identify Hatfill by name, but described him in sufficient detail: a Middle-aged American who [w]orks for a CIA contractor in Washington, DC area and [w]orked in USAMRIID laboratory in the past and [k]nows Bill Patrick and probably learned a thing or two about weaponization from him informally. Id. In his amended complaint, Hatfill states that Professor Rosenbergs Possible Portrait of the Anthrax Perpetrator . . . described [him].

In addition to her postings on the FAS website, Professor Rosenberg also presented a lecture on February 18, 2002 at Princeton Universitys Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, entitled The Anthrax Attacks and the Control of Bioterrorism. Ex. 2. During the course of her lecture, Rosenberg stated that she had draw[n] a likely portrait of the perpetrator as a former Fort Detrick scientist who is now working for a contractor in the Washington, D.C, area[.] Ex. 3. Rosenberg also commented upon Hatfills whereabouts on the date of the attacks, stating that [h]e had reason for travel to Florida, New Jersey and the United Kingdom  where the attacks had been and from which the letters had been purportedly sent  that [h]e grew [the anthrax], probably on a solid medium, and weaponised it at a private location where he had accumulated the equipment and the material. Id. Rosenberg also stated that the investigation had narrowed to a common suspect[,] and that [t]he FBI has questioned that person more than once[.] Id. Former White House Spokesperson, Ari Fleischer, immediately responded to Rosenbergs comments, stating that there were several suspects and the FBI had not narrowed that list down to one. Ex. 4. The FBI also issued a press release, stating that it had interviewed hundreds of persons, in some instances, more than once. It is not accurate, however, that the FBI has identified a prime suspect in this case. Id. Rosenbergs comments and writings were subsequently pursued by The New York Times (The Times). In a series of Op-Ed articles published from May through July 2002, Nicholas Kristof, a journalist with The Times, accused Hatfill of being responsible for the anthrax attacks. Kristof wrote on May 24, 2002 that the FBI was overlooking the anthrax perpetrator, noting that experts (Professor Rosenberg) point to one middle-aged American who has worked for the United States military bio-defense program and had access to the labs at Fort Detrick, Md. His anthrax vaccinations are up to date, he unquestionably had the ability to make first-rate anthrax, and he was upset at the United States government in the period preceding the anthrax attack. Ex. 5.

Hatfill first noticed the Kristof columns in May 2002. Hatfill Dep. Tran. in Hatfill v. The New York Times, No. 04-807 (E.D.Va.), Ex. 6, at 13: 3-6. According to Hatfill, [w]hen Mr. Kristofs article appeared, it was the first [time] that [he] realized that [his] name [was] in the public domain with connection with an incident of mass murder. Id. at 16:15-18. Hatfill has charged that The Times began the entire conflagration and gave every journalist out there reason to drive this thing beyond any sort of sanity. Mr. Kristof lit the fuse to a barn fire and he repeatedly kept stoking the fire. Id. at 43:19 - 44:1. In July 2004, Hatfill thus filed suit alleging that these articles libeled him by falsely accusing him of being the anthrax mailer. Complaint, Hatfill v. The New York Times, No. 04-807 (E.D.Va.), Ex. 7.

Hatfill alleges in that lawsuit that Kristof wrote his columns in such a way as to impute guilt for the anthrax letters to [him] in the minds of reasonable readers. Id. ¶ 12. The articles, Hatfill claimed, which described his background and work in the field of bio-terrorism, state or imply that [he] was the anthrax mailer. Id. ¶ 14. Hatfill specifically alleged that statements in Kristofs articles were false and defamatory, including those that stated that he: (1) unquestionably had the ability to make first-rate anthrax; (2) had the ability to send the anthrax; (3) had the access required to send the anthrax; (4) had a motive to send the anthrax; (5) was one of a handful of individuals who had the ability, access and motive to send the anthrax; (6) had access to an isolated residence in the fall of 2001, when the anthrax letters were sent; (7) gave CIPRO [an antibiotic famously used in the treatment of anthrax infection] to people who visited [the isolated residence]; (8) his anthrax vaccinations were up to date as of May 24, 2002; (9) he failed 3 successive polygraph examinations between January 2002 and August 13, 2002; (10) he was upset at the United States government in the period preceding the attack; (11) he was once caught with a girlfriend in a biohazard hot suite at Fort Detrick [where Hatfill had concedely worked] surrounded only by blushing germs. Id. ¶ 16 (brackets in original). Hatfill alleges in his lawsuit against The Times that [t]he publication of [Kristofs] repeated defamation of [him] . . .gave rise to severe notoriety gravely injurious to [him]. Id. ¶ 29. The injury, Hatfill alleged, was [made] all the more severe given the status and journalistic clout of The Times. Id. This harm was compounded, Hatfill alleged, by the fact that these articles were thereafter repeatedly published by a host of print and on-line publications and on the television and radio news in the following months. Id., ¶ 30.

The case was initially dismissed by the trial court. Hatfill v. The New York Times, No. 04-807, 2004 WL 3023003 (E.D.Va.). That decision was reversed by the United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit, 416 F.3d 320 (4th Cir. 2005). Upon remand, the trial court granted The Times summary judgment, finding that Hatfill was a public figure and public official and had failed to present evidence of malice. Hatfill v. The New York Times, 488 F. Supp. 2d 522 (E.D. Va. 2007). In arriving at that conclusion, the court considered Hatfills repeated media interviews before the attacks; the fact that he had drafted a novel, which he registered with [the] United States Copyright office, describing a scenario in which a terrorist sickens government officials with a biological agent; and had lectured on the medical effects of chemical and biological agents. Id. at 525.

Although not recited by the district court in The New York Times litigation, Hatfill also talked directly to reporters about his suspected involvement in the attacks. Brian Ross of ABC News, and his producer, Victor Walter, for example, talked separately to Hatfill on two to three occasions as early as January and February 2002, Ross Dep. Tran., Ex. 8, at 263:14 - 270:1, and continued talking to Hatfill until May of that year. Id. Ross also spoke to Hatfills friend and mentor, William Patrick, about Hatfill. Id. at 287:9 - 295:12. These meetings were prompted by discussions ABC News had in January 2002 with eight to twelve former colleagues of Hatfill at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID). Id. at 242:7 - 246:14. Hatfills former colleagues found him to be highly suspicious because of a number of things he had done when he worked at [USAMRIID], and this behavior was strange "and unusual and they felt that he was a likely candidate. Id. at 242: 7-17. These meetings were also prompted by ABC Newss own investigative reporting into Hatfills background; the more ABC News learned the more interested [they] became in Hatfill. Id. at 264: 14-15.

Scott Shane of the Baltimore Sun also spoke to Hatfill in February 2002. Shane also spoke to USAMRIID employees who had worked with Hatfill. Ex. 9. These employees stated that they had been questioned by the FBI and asked about a former Fort Detrick scientist  Hatfill  who returned a few years ago and took discarded biological safety cabinets, used for work with dangerous pathogens. Id. at 1. These employees claimed that Hatfill ha[d] expertise on weaponizing anthrax and ha[d] been vaccinated against it[.] Id. Shane also called one of Hatfills former classmates, who was plagued by questions from the Baltimore Sun and others within the media regarding Hatfills alleged involvement with the large anthrax outbreak in Zimbabwe[.] Ex. 10. According to Hatfill, this classmate was told by Shane that Hatfill was purportedly responsible for mailing the anthrax letters and also starting the [anthrax] outbreak in Zimbabwe/ Rhodesia twenty years before. Ex. 11, at AGD29SJH00014; see also e-mail to Hatfill fr. DF Andrews, dated Mar. 1, 2002, Ex. 10. Hatfill told Shane in February 2002 that he had been questioned by the FBI and that he considered the questioning to be part of a routine effort to eliminate people with the knowledge to mount [the] attack. Ex. 9. Hatfill also confirmed for Shane that he had taken an FBI polygraph. Ex. 12, at 2. In March 2002, Hatfill left Shane a frantic telephone message reportedly stating how he had been [in the bioterrorism] field for a number of years, working until 3 oclock in the morning, trying to counter this type of weapon of mass destruction and fearing that his career [was] over at [that] time. Ex. 13, at 2. According to Hatfill, Shane later Case 1:03-cv-01793-RBW Document 232-2 Filed 04/11/2008 Page 17 of 73

____ Hatfill did not sue either Shane or Rosenberg, even though Hatfill has stated that Rosenberg caused the focus on him. Ex. 14, at 10. Because Hatfill believed that the portrait Rosenberg painted at the February 2002 Princeton conference and in her website postings was so identifying and incriminating, however, Hatfill advised Rosenberg through his lawyers that before [she] get[s] close to describing him in the future, by name or otherwise, [that she] submit [her] comments for legal vetting before publishing them to anyone. Ex. 15. There is no evidence that the agency defendants bore any responsibility for the media presence. Information about FBI searches is routinely shared with a variety of state and local law enforcement authorities. Roth Dep. Tran., Ex. 16, at 163:5 -165:21; Garrett Dep. Tran. Ex. 17, at 79: 8-18. ______

compounded Hatfills problems by calling his then-employer, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), and accusing Hatfill of being responsible for the anthrax attacks, Ex. 11, at AGD29SJH00014, which, according to Hatfill, cost him his job as a contractor at SAIC. Id. 1

The media frenzy surrounding Hatfill intensified upon the search of his apartment on June 25, 2002, and the search of a refrigerated mini-storage facility in Ocala, Florida on June 26, 2002. Both were witnessed by the media, and the search of his apartment was carried live on national television. In addition to the television coverage, the searches generated a slew of articles about Hatfill throughout the media, one fueling the next. The Associated Press, for example, detailed in an article, dated June 27, 2002, Hatfills (1) work as biodefense researcher, including studies he had conducted at SAIC, and the work he had done at the USAMRIID; (2) his educational background; (3) where he had previously lived; and (4) security clearances he had held and the suspension of those clearances. Ex. 18. The Hartford Courant reported these same details, and additional information regarding Hatfills purported service in the Rhodesian army. Ex. 19. The next day -- June 28, 2002 -- the Hartford Courant reported details about Hatfills background in biological warfare, his vaccinations against anthrax, questioning that purportedly had occurred among Hatfills colleagues, his educational background (including the claim that he had attended medical school in Greendale), and lectures that he had given on the process of turning biological agents into easily inhaled powders. Ex. 20. None of this information is attributed to a government source.

B. Hatfills Public Relations Offensive

In July 2002, after these reports and after the first search of Hatfills apartment on June 25, 2002, Hatfill retained Victor Glasberg as his attorney. Glasberg Dep. Tran., Ex. 21, at 12: 16-19. Glasberg believed that any number of people in the media [had] overstepped their bounds. . . . prior to July of 2002 . Id. at 141:1 - 142:6. To counter this information, Hatfill set out on a public relations offensive of his own to turn [the] tide. Id. at 138: 20-21, 178: 12-13.

Recognizing that Hatfill continue[d] [to] get[] killed with bad press, national as well as local[,] Hatfill drafted a statement and Glasberg forwarded that statement in July 2002 to Hatfills then-employer at Louisiana State University (LSU). Ex. 11, at 1. The statement detailed Hatfills background, including his medical training and employment history, and provided details about Hatfills involvement in the anthrax investigation, including how he had been interviewed by the FBI and had taken a polygraph examination. Id. at AGD29SJH00002-13. Hatfills statement corroborated the conversations that Hatfill reportedly had with Scott Shane of the Baltimore Sun in February 2002, and how that interaction had purportedly cost Hatfill his job at SAIC in March 2002. Id. at AGD29SJH00014.

In his July statement, Hatfill was careful not to blame DOJ or the FBI for his troubles or for any wrongdoing for the information about him that had made its way into the press. He touted the professionalism of the FBI, noting that [t]he individual FBI agents with whom [he had come] in contact during this entire process are sons and daughters of which America can be justifiably proud. They are fine men and women doing their best to protect this country. Id. at AGD29SJH00016. Hatfills objection lay with the media, whom he labeled as irresponsible[,] for trading in half-truths, innuendo and speculation, making accusations and slanting real world events . . . to gain viewer recognition, sell newspapers, and increase readership and network ratings. Id.

As the investigation proceeded, however, Glasberg publicly criticized investigators on the date of the second search of Hatfills apartment, August 1, 2002, for obtaining a search warrant rather than accepting the offer Glasberg had allegedly made to cooperate. Ex. 22. So angry was Glasberg with investigators that he wrote a letter, dated the same day as the search, to Assistant United States Attorney Kenneth C. Kohl, denouncing the fact that the search had been conducted pursuant to a search warrant. Ex. 23. Glasberg forwarded a copy of this letter to Tom Jackman of the Washington Post, and to the Associated Press, the morning of August 1st. Glasberg, Dep. Tran., Ex. 24, at 265:12 - 266:5; see also Ex. 25 (Glasberg memorandum to file, stating, among other things, that Glasberg showed Jackman Kohl letter on August 1, 2002).

On the day of the search, an FBI spokeswoman at the Bureaus Washington field office, Debra Weierman, confirmed that the search was part of the governments anthrax investigation. Ex. 25. Weierman added, however, that she was unable to confirm that [investigators were acting on a search warrant] or to provide any further information about the search. Id.

The next day  August 2, 2002  Glasberg faxed the Kohl letter to members of the media. Ex. 26. In the fax transmittal sheet accompanying the Kohl letter, Glasberg also advised the media that: Dr. Hatfill was first contacted by the FBI earlier this year, as part of the Bureaus survey of several dozen scientists working in fields related to biomedical warfare. He was voluntarily debriefed and polygraphed, and voluntarily agreed to have his home, car and other property subjected to a lengthy and comprehensive search by the FBI. He and his lawyer Tom Carter were told that the results were all favorable and that he was not a suspect in the case. Id. at AGD16SJH03106. Subsequent to the fax transmittal by Glasberg, Weierman confirmed that the search had been conducted pursuant to a search warrant, but only after receiving appropriate authorization from her superiors. Weierman Dep. Tran., Ex. 27, at 93:16 - 94:14.

Hatfill had also accompanied Glasberg for his interview with Jackman the day before to address the media feeding frenzy. Ex. 28. Glasberg provided Jackman with the promise of an [e]xclusive personal statement from Hatfill and the promise of [n]o other press contacts pending publication of the article. Id. Glasberg thus provided Jackman background information about Hatfill, Rosenbergs statements, and other publications. Ex. 25. Hatfill reportedly complained to the Washington Post in the interview about the media feeding frenzy, and about how his friends are bombarded with press inquiries. Ex. 29, at 1. Hatfill also complained about the [p]hone calls at night. Trespassing. Beating on my door. For the sheer purpose of selling newspapers and television. Id.

C. Attorney General Ashcrofts Person of Interest Statements

Following this media frenzy, not to mention the two searches of Hatfills apartment, former Attorney General John Ashcroft was asked on August 6, 2002 (at an event addressing the subject of missing and exploited children) about Hatfills involvement in the investigation. Jane Clayson of CBS News asked General Ashcroft about the searches and whether Hatfill was a suspect in the investigation. Ex. 30, at 2. General Ashcroft responded that Hatfill was a person of interest. General Ashcroft cautioned, however, that he was not prepared to say any more at [that] time other than the fact that he is an individual of interest. Id. At the same media event, Matt Lauer of NBC News also asked General Ashcroft whether Hatfill was a suspect in the investigation. Ex. 31. General Ashcroft responded that Hatfill was a person that  that the FBIs been interested in. Id. at 2. General Ashcroft cautioned that he was not prepared to make a . . . comment about whether a person is officially a . . . suspect or not. Id.

General Ashcroft made the same comments at a news conference in Newark, New Jersey on August 22, 2002, stating that Hatfill was a person of interest to the Department of Justice, and we continue the investigation. Ex. 32, at 1. As in his previous statements, General Ashcroft refused to provide further comment. Id. When asked upon deposition why he referred to Hatfill as a person of interest in the anthrax investigation in response to these media inquiries, General Ashcroft testified that he did so in an attempt to correct the record presented by the media that he was a suspect in the investigation, which he believed served a necessary law enforcement purpose. Ashcroft Dep. Tran., Ex. 33, at 81: 5-12; 103:18; 108: 9-13; 138: 5-7; 125: 18-21; 134:22 - 136:8. Prior to making these statements, General Ashcroft did not review or otherwise consult any investigative record, id. at 128:14 - 129:12, much less any record pertaining to Hatfill.

General Ashcrofts initial statements on August 6, 2002 were followed, on August 11, 2002, by the first of Hatfills two nationally televised press conferences. Ex. 34. During his press conference, Hatfill lashed out at Rosenberg and other journalists and columnists who he believed wrote a series of defamatory speculation and innuendo about [him]. Id. at 3. In apparent response to the person of interest statements, by contrast, he stated that he did not object to being considered a subject of interest because of [his] knowledge and background in the field of biological warfare. Id. at 4. This was consistent with Hatfills statement to ABC News earlier in 2002 in which he stated that his background and comments made him a logical subject of the investigation. Ex. 35. As noted, moreover, Glasberg told the media -- almost a week before the first of General Ashcrofts statements -- that Hatfill was first contacted by the FBI [earlier that] year, as part of the Bureaus survey of several dozen scientists working in fields related to biomedical warfare. He was voluntarily debriefed and polygraphed, and voluntarily agreed to have his home, car and other property subjected to a lengthy and comprehensive search by the FBI. Ex. 26.

Hatfills second press conference was held on August 25, 2002. In the flyer publicizing the conference, Hatfill identified himself to the media -- in bold lettering -- as the person of interest at the center of the federal Governments [anthrax] investigation. DA, Exhibit 36.

D. Clawsons Sunshine Policy

Patrick Clawson joined the Hatfill team in early August 2002 as spokesperson and fielded hundreds of inquiries from members of the press worldwide regarding Dr. Hatfill[.] Ex. 12, at 13. Clawson believed it best to employ a media strategy that would, in his words, let it all hang out. Id. at 50:10. Clawson felt that permitting maximum sunshine into . . . Hatfills existence would do both him and the public the best good. Clawson Dep. Tran., Ex. 37, at 50:16-18.

The majority of Clawsons communications with the press regarding this case have been oral and by telephone and he did not keep a press log or any other regular record of such contacts with the press. Ex. 12, at 13. Clawson nonetheless admitted upon deposition that he revealed numerous details about Hatfills personal and professional background to members of the press (Clawson Dep. Tran., Ex. 37, at 101:9 - 105:21), including Hatfills professional expertise (id. at 103:10 - 105:21), use of Cipro (id. at 123:16 - 130:11, 248: 8-13), whereabouts on the days of the attacks (id. at 148:12 - 158:10, 361:15 - 362:3), expertise in working with anthrax (id. at 194:13 - 195:8), former service in the Rhodesian Army (id. at 210:9 - 211:10), and drunk driving arrest (id. at 795: 7-9, 798: 4-6). Clawson also told reporters what had been purportedly removed from Hatfills apartment during the two searches of his apartment on June 25, 2002 and August 1, 2002 (including medical books and a jar of bacillus thuringiensis (BT)) (id. at 121: 6-12, 131:2 - 131:12, 14:8 - 147:3, 313: 3-10). Clawson also freely relayed to the press that bloodhounds had been presented to Hatfill during the investigation (id. at 200: 15-19); that Hatfill had been the subject of surveillance (id. at 123:12-15, 428: 19-21); that Hatfill had taken polygraphs (id. at 135:16 - 137:17); and that he had submitted to blood tests (id. at 137:18-138:5, 347: 6-10).

In furtherance of Clawsons sunshine policy, Hatfill, Clawson, and Glasberg, together, provided countless on-the-record, on-background (i.e., for use, but not for attribution), and off-the-record (i.e., not for attribution or use) interviews to counter misinformation. Although Hatfill repeatedly claimed upon deposition not to remember what he said during these interviews, he acknowledged in his responses to the Agency Defendants interrogatories having such conversations with, in addition to Mr. Jackman, Judith Miller of The New York Times, Jeremy Cherkis of the City Paper, Guy Gugliotta of the Washington Post, David Kestenbaum of National Public Radio, Rick Schmidt of the LA Times, Rob Buchanan of NBC Dateline, Jim Popkin of NBC News, Dee Ann David and Nick Horrock of UPI, Gary Matsumato of Fox TV, Bill Gertz of the Washington Times, and David Tell of the Weekly Standard. Ex. 12, at 3-4. With respect to the Matsumato interview, Glasberg warned Hatfill before the interview that he should not be quoted, nor should Matsumato say or imply that he spoke with him. Ex. 38, at 1. Glasberg warned Hatfill that Matsumato must be willing to go to jail rather than reveal word one of anything [he] says on deep background. Id.

All of these disclosures became too much even for Glasberg, who attempted to put a stop to them. In August, when Jackman aired his exclusive interview with Glasberg and Hatfill, Glasberg heralded the success of his public relations strategy noting that Rosenberg, Shane and Kristof are, [each] of them, in varying stages of sulking, licking their wounds, reacting defensively and changing their tune. Ex. 39. Slowly Glasberg advised both Hatfill and Glasberg to observe the rule of COMPLETE SILENCE regarding anything and everything about the case[.] Ex. 40 (emphasis in original). Ultimately, in September 2002, Glasberg ordered Clawson to stand down, noting [w]hat you know, you know, and you have put virtually all of that into the public record. Fine. That is where we are, and for good or ill we can and will deal with it. But we must put a full stop to any further conveyance of substantive data about ANYTHING from Steve to anyone [but his attorneys]. Ex. 41 (emphasis in original). To no avail. On October 5, 2002, Hatfill and Clawson appeared together at an Accuracy in Media Conference. Hatfill was asked about the reaction of bloodhounds, and stated, Im not supposed to answer things against . . . but let me tell you something. They brought this good-looking dog in. I mean, this was the best-fed dog I have seen in a long time. They brought him in and he walked around the room. By the way, I could have left at anytime but I volunteered while they were raiding my apartment the second time, I volunteered to talk with them. The dog came around and I petted him. And the dog walked out. So animals like me (laughter). Ex. 42, at 2.

Disclosures from the Hatfill camp to the media continued. For example, between late 2002 and May 8, 2003, Hatfills current attorney, Tom Connolly, and CBS News reporter James Stewart had multiple telephone conversations and two lunch meetings. Ex. 43. According to Stewart, Connolly told Stewart that the investigation was focusing on Hatfill, and detailed at great length the FBIs surveillance of Hatfill. In virtually every one of these conversations, Connolly encouraged Stewart to report on these subjects. Id. at 96.

E. Louisiana State Universitys Decision To Terminate Hatfill

At the time of the second search of his apartment in August 2002, Hatfill was working as a contract employee at the Louisiana State University (LSU) on a program to train first responders in the event of a biological attack. This program was funded by the Department of Justices Office of Justice Programs (OJP) as part of a cooperative agreement. Ex. 44. Under the terms of the cooperative agreement, OJP maintain[ed] managerial oversight and control of the program. Id. at 2. Following the second search of Hatfills apartment on August 1, 2002, Timothy Beres, Acting Director of OJPs Office of Domestic Preparedness, directed that LSU cease and desist from utilizing the subject-matter expert and course instructor duties of Steven J. Hatfill on all Department of Justice funded programs. Ex. 45. LSU, meanwhile, had independently hired Hatfill to serve as Associate Director of its Academy of Counter-Terrorist Education. Following the second search, LSU placed Hatfill on administrative leave. Ex. 46. LSU then requested a background check of Hatfill. Ex. 47. During the course of that investigation, the University became concerned that Hatfill had forged a diploma for a Ph.D that he claimed to have received from Rhodes University in South Africa. Hatfill explained to Stephen L. Guillott, Jr., who was the Director of the Academy of Counter-Terrorist Education at LSU, that [h]e assumed the degree had, in fact been awarded since neither his [thesis advisor] nor Rhodes University advised him to the contrary. Ex. 48. LSUs Chancellor, Mark A. Emmert, made an internal decision to terminate [LSUs] relationship with Dr. Hatfill quite independent of [the DOJ e-mail] communication. Ex. 51.

Hatfill has now testified that in fact he created a fraudulent diploma with the assistance of someone he met in a bar who boasted that he could make a fraudulent diploma. Hatfill Dep. Tran., Ex. 49 at 19:20 - 20:12. Glasberg, moreover, has stated under oath that Hatfills earlier attempted explanation was untrue. Glasberg, Dep. Tran., Ex. 21, at 314:10 - 317:2. In a nationally televised 60 Minutes episode that aired in March 2007, Connolly confirmed that Hatfill forged the diploma for the Ph.D from Rhodes University. Ex. 50, at 3.

F. Hatfills Amended Complaint

Hatfill claims lost wages and other emotional damages resulting from General Ashcrofts person of interest statements and other for-attribution statements by DOJ and FBI officials. He also seeks to recover for certain other alleged leaks by DOJ and FBI officials. Hatfill additionally asserts that the defendants violated the Act by purportedly failing to (1) maintain an accurate accounting of such disclosures, which he asserts is required by section 552a(c) of the Act; (2) establish appropriate safeguards to insure the security and confidentiality of the records that were purportedly disclosed, which he asserts is required by section 552a(e)(10); (3) correct information that was disseminated about him that was inaccurate or incomplete, which he asserts is required by section 552a(e)(5); and (4) establish adequate rules of conduct, procedures, and penalties for noncompliance, or to train employees in the requirements of the Act, which he asserts is required by section 552a(e)(9). Defendants are entitled to summary judgment.

So Seikaly was leaking Hatfill’s name to the media for years - and he knew some other guy’s name all along? Right!

Lambert gave judge Walton a briefing 3 years ago - with super secret information (presumably including this imaginary other persons name) - and Walton laughed him out of court. Right!

The congress are holding the FBI’s feet to the fire - Mueller may lose his job - but they have this other guy’s name - it’s not Hatfill, it’s not Berry - but for some reason they did NOT go public with this name. Right!

In a filing unsealed last month, Dr. Ali Al-Timimi’s lawyer wrote: Al-Timimi “was considered an anthrax weapons suspect.” You fellows should realize how significant it is that the leading anthrax scientist — cited numerous times in every biosecurity book in the field — was, according to Ali’s lawyer:

* interviewed in 1994 by the FBI and Secret Service regarding his ties to the perpetrators of the first World Trade Center bombing;

* referenced in the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing (”Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US”) as one of seventy individuals regarding whom the FBI is conducting full field investigations on a national basis;

* described to his brother by the FBI within days of the 9-11 attacks as an immediate suspect in the Al Qaeda conspiracy;

* contacted by the FBI only nine days after 9-11 and asked about the attacks and its perpetrators;

* considered an anthrax weapons suspect;

[redacted]

* described during his trial by FBI agent John Wyman as having “extensive ties” with the “broader al-Qaeda network”;

* described in the indictment and superseding indictment as being associated with terrorists seeking harm to the United States;

* was a participant in dozens of international overseas calls to individuals known to have been under suspicion of Al-Qaeda ties like Al-Hawali; and

* was associated with the long investigation of the Virginia Jihad Group.

Ali’s lawyer says the conversation with Al-Hawali on September 19, 2001 was central to the indictment and raised at trial. Al-Timimi called Dr. Hawali after the dinner with Kwon on September 16, 2001 and just two hours before he met with Kwon and Hassan for the last time on September 19, 2001. The anthrax was mailed on or about September 18.

The lawyers says “]911 imam] Anwar Al-Aulaqi goes directly to Dr. Al-Timimi’s state of mind and his role in the alleged conspiracy. The 9-11 Report indicates that Special Agent Ammerman interviewed Al-Aulaqi just before or shortly after his October 2002 visit to Dr. Al-Timimi’s home to discuss the attacks and his efforts to reach out to the U.S. government.”

[IANA head] Bassem Khafagi was questioned about Dr. Al-Timimi before 9-11 in Jordan, purportedly at the behest of American intelligence. [redacted ] He was specifically asked about Dr. Al-Timimi’s connection to Bin Laden prior to Dr. Al-Timimi’s arrest. He was later interviewed by the FBI about Dr. Al-Timimi. Clearly, such early investigations go directly to the allegations of Dr. Al-Timimi’s connections to terrorists and Bin Laden — [redacted]”

The letter by Al-Timimi’s counsel attached as an exhibit is equally meaty. An example of an additional detail is that in March 2002, Dr. Al-Timimi spoke with Dr. Al-Hawali (Bin Laden’s sheik who was the subject of OBL’s “Declaration of War”) about assisting Moussaoui in his defense. Moussaoui was the one with cropdusting documents on his laptop.

The filing and the letter exhibit each copy the daughter of the lead prosecutor in Amerithrax. That prosecutor has pled the Fifth Amendment concerning all the leaks hyping a “POI” of the other Amerithrax squad, Dr. Steve Hatfill.

In an e-mail obtained by FOX News, scientists at Fort Detrick openly discussed how the anthrax powder they were asked to analyze after the attacks was nearly identical to that made by one of their colleagues.

“Then he said he had to look at a lot of samples that the FBI had prepared ... to duplicate the letter material.” “Then the bombshell. He said that the best duplication of the material was the stuff made by [name redacted]. He said that it was almost exactly the same — his knees got shaky and he sputtered, ‘But I told the General we didn’t make spore powder!’”

FOX News reports:

“The FBI has narrowed its focus to “about four” suspects in the 6 1/2-year investigation of the deadly anthrax attacks of 2001, and at least three of those suspects are linked to the Armys bioweapons research facility at Fort Detrick in Maryland, FOX News has learned.

Among the pool of suspects are three scientists  a former deputy commander, a leading anthrax scientist and a microbiologist  linked to the research facility, known as USAMRIID.”

It was more than a happy coincidence for Ayman Zawahiri and Mohammed Islambouli that an active supporter of the Taliban and supporter of jihad was a US biodefense insider. Microbiologist Al-Timimi worked in the same building as famed Russian bioweapons scientist Ken Alibek and former USAMRIID Deputy Commander and Acting Commander Charles Bailey, who would come to publish a lot of research with the Ames strain of anthrax. Al-Timimi was a current associate and former student of Bin Ladens spiritual advisor, dissident Saudi Sheik al-Hawali. He would speak along with the blind sheiks son at charity conferences  the blind sheiks son served on Al Qaedas WMD committee. Al-Timimis mentor Bilal Philips was known for recruiting members of the military to jihad. The first week after 9/11, FBI agents questioned Ali Al-Timimi, a microbiology graduate student in a program jointly run by George Mason University and the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC). Ali, according to his lawyer, had been questioned by an FBI agent and Secret Service agent in 1994 after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He had a high security clearance for work for the Navy in he late 1990s and in 1996 for two months had worked for the White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card when he was Secretary of Transportation. As time off from his university studies permitted, Ali was an active speaker with a charity Islamic Assembly of North America the spin-off of which is located here where I am. My interest dates to 2001. You two are very blind not to see that the FBI and CIA have been kicking butt. I first told the CIA that Ayman was a devious fellow who would rely on infiltration.

“You fellows should realize how significant it is that THE GUY 15 FEET FROM the leading anthrax scientist  cited numerous times in every biosecurity book in the field  was, according to Alis lawyer...”

I mistakenly omitted “the guy 15 feet from”

The trashing of Ali’s charity here and electronic surveillance dates way, way back before the 2/2003 raid — to 2001, I believe. They had numerous agents from numerous agencies. I think, offhand, for example, there were 30 extensions of a warrant on one target prior to the raid. They were trashing. They had someone undercover. You assume, TrebleRebel, that because the FBI doesn’t issue a press release there isn’t a lot going on. That’s silly. As an example of how such an investigation would be conducted, see the book by a journalist PRIORITY MAIL, involving the federal mailbombing of a federal judge.

Let me describe one of the FBI’s Masons that worked in building a case.

Michael Mason was in the Syracuse, New York office, when 2:15 a.m. one night, a 115,000-volt transmission tower came crashing down not far down the street from me. Mason investigated when the tower on the nearby Onondaga Indian reservation came 50 feet from landing on a cigarette shop, near where the local residents buy their smokes.

“This is a serious felony. It is more than just criminal mischief,” Mason said. The Niagara Mohawk spokesperson declined to comment on what caused the tower to fall. But a local Onondaga businessman Oliver Hill said he knew. The tower missed crushing his cigarette shop by about 50 feet, which had been opened without the permission of the local Onondaga tribal leaders. “There has been sabotage on that tower because on each leg there are 20 to 30 bolts,” said Hill. “All the bolts were taken out on all four legs. So when the bolts are taken out, there’s nothing to hold it up so it fell over. Yes, it was sabotage.” I didn’t call the local FBI office about the tower incident. After all, smoking kills 400,000 people a year.

Instead, I contacted the FBI office to tell them that a Ronald Reagan mask had been found along with a bank bag where the man lay in wait with a semi-automatic — first for my brother, and then the next week my father. A Ronald Reagan mask was the signature of a very dangerous bank robber known as the “Closing Time Bandit.” The FBI agent in the small local office, who did not identify himself, said something to the effect: “We killed the Closing Time Bandit who used a Ronald Reagan mask in robbing banks. So this guy can’t be responsible for those robberies.”

Before moving on to Washington, D.C., Mason said his most memorable case was this “Closing Time Bandit” case. Not long before he was shot dead as 40 FBI agents surrounded him at Henrietta, New York, the robber had decorated his yard with balloons on his daughter’s birthday.

Ronald Petersen had been killed Aug. 15, 1996 by FBI agents in the Rochester suburb of Henrietta while plotting another heist. The rightist, who had been tracked by a miniature television camera on a telephone pole outside his home, died in a hail of bullets. When police searched his house in Liverpool, a Syracuse suburb, they recovered 20 guns, including two Uzis, 20,000 rounds of ammunition and a cache of explosives.

“I know. “ I told the agent, “This guy’s parole officer says his apartment in Watertown is covered with newspaper articles glorifying famous New York State criminals. He’s trying to make you fellows look foolish. By being a copycat and making it look like you killed the wrong guy.”

The ex-convict and three-time loser who tried to take my Dad away at gunpoint that night before Christmas got 20+ years to life. Robbery was the apparent motive. That night, the police siren had come on within seconds of the 9/11 call coming in. The gunman spent the night holed up in a nearby garage and was captured after a psychiatrist/hostage negotiator came from Syracuse and talked him out of the garage. He asked that they kneel and pray together. (I never said the gunman, a former altar boy, was very bright). So why, as a liberal, am I such a booster of the FBI and local law enforcement?
Of [former] Agent Michael Mason in particular? Why had TrebelRebel better straighten up and fly right? Because it is their job to protect and serve when some among us, overcome by anger and not being properly socialized, resort to hurting innocents, such as the elderly Mrs. Lundgren or the infant at ABC. It’s time to stop second-guessing them based on inadequate information and be supportive even if we might disagree with them.

Mason was a friend in Syracuse, anti-war activist Kathleen Rumpf, who calls herself a “felon for peace” and is a staunch IANA supporter. She had been a personal hero of mine long before I met her based on positive comments I had heard. She spent several months in prison for trespassing during a demonstration against the School for the Americas at Fort Benning, Ga. She has worked for years fighting for prisoner rights and other issues. When Mason showed up there one of the first things he did was meet with her. “He’s quite wonderful,” Rumpf told the Sacramento Bee in an interview from the Syracuse offices of the American Civil Liberties Union. “He was incredibly responsible and treated me with great respect.” Mason says: “I’m not complicated enough to be political. It’s too hard.”

As part of canvassing as part of a local political campaign, I was walking up a street in Syracuse in front of Kathleen Rumpf’s home on October 15, 2003 when my wife drove up, pointing out that the very short street had both Rumpf and the Berrigans (related to the late famed Catholic anti-nuclear pacifist). My time would be wasted urging them to vote for The Candidate. They were long-time family friends. I had been at a charity fundraiser when she ran merrily around the crowd — at the egging of one of the performers on stage — when the elder Berrigan spoke eloquently against the war in Iraq.

This is how this liberal could be not as concerned about the privacy rights, for example, associated with what people do when they use a computer at the library or use the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive. I once crusaded against (in a suit against AT&T) against what I argued was widespread illegal wiretapping by the local law enforcement authorities in some states such as Vermont. With the advent of digital wiretapping, the potential for abuse by a rogue wiretapper is huge and can be done by the person at his desk using a laptop). The week before, on a crisp October morning, I had bought a bumper sticker from Barrie Gewanter, the local ACLU activist, at the Syracuse Festival of Races, who likely was advocating at the time on the IANA matter (I don’t recall specifically). I told her that I greatly admired her work and that reasonable people can disagree. The key, I said, to achieve the best balancing of interests was to have an informed debate. But when I know that people like Michael Mason are advising Director Mueller, I feel both secure and confident that authorities will always continue to strive to strike an appropriate balance. Although he was a little stiff before the Press Club, Mueller’s solid values came across and any shyness reminds one of the shyness of movie character, lawyer Atticus Finch.

Mason once gave a speech to 250 high school students gathered at the Syracuse University campus in 1998 for High School Press Day in which he explained to the students that it was important for both the FBI and the media not to rush to judgment. He drew parallels between the two professions, explaining that the most important characteristic in either profession is integrity. On another occasion, he spoke bluntly to young inmates and told them there were consequences to their actions. Another time he and the DA spoke to kids about violence at the request of area educators. One of his most baffling cases was a rash of thefts of two-way radios throughout the area.

Mason realized the importance of catching a lucky break in a case. Once, in 1998, he had been working for 4 months trying to track down the 2 year old daughter who had been taken by a divorced father from the mother. He fruitlessly tracked leads that seemed to lead to Australia and London. Then one Saturday he went to work to collect his thoughts and plot a new strategy, when someone called from Montreal to describe the drunken boasting of the father in a bar in Montreal.

Mason investigated teenage Animal Defense League members in connection with an attempted bombing incident at a local meat plant noting that the FBI was not targeting their beliefs, but their actions when those beliefs turned to violence. During his stay in Syracuse, his only apparent involvement in matters relating to radical islamists was to read of goings-on at the kitchen table in the morning. “Bomb focuses on radical cleric: Imprisoned sheik’s followers might have sent letter bombs,” investigators say,” Syracuse Herald-Journal, Jan. 4, 1997.

Mason once described how a bank robbery was solved by discovering that the bank note had been written by a second grader. The bank robber, Michael Davis, handed a teller at the Marine Midland Bank a note demanding money on January 5, 1990. On the bottom half, police found part of a letter to a child signed by “Santa’s Helper.” Agents traced the letter to a second grade class at Franklin Elementary School, where the bank robber’s stepson attended. The FBI then was able to match the robber’s palm print to the note. Let’s hope Mason, while he was working Amerithrax, was working Saturdays — and has a SWAT Team at the ready (and a camera on the telephone pole outside) — and not hoping that a kid wrote the anthrax letters.

How many does it take to monitor one person who needs to be closely surveilled according to Mason? As many as eight agents per shift if he is mobile. Another half-dozen to listen in on his calls. Others perhaps to file wiretap reports or handle aerial surveillance. A couple supervisory agents to oversee the case. $55 an hour for an agent. $150 for a plane. A lot more for electronic surveillance.

In March 2004, Michael Mason explained to students gathered at his alma mater: “Our No. 1 job is disruption today. Now you have 100,000 pieces to a puzzle. Somebody has carted off all the box tops, and embedded inside those 100,000 pieces is a 20-piece picture of an event that you have to get out in front of and prevent before it happens while at the same time trying to preserve all the freedoms and liberties that we have come to embrace in this country.” He continued: “But we still have to do the job the right way. My job is to make sure that we do it the right way  that, in our zeal, we do not do anything that takes away from what defines us.” “If we lose confidence in our institutions, then we tear away at the very fabric that defines democracy. When you no longer trust the courts, the police, congressmen, senators, thats the beginning of the end. Thats some of the most important work that we do.”

Consider the example of a 35 year-old fellow named Mubarak, who was a friend of Murad, a key player in Bojinka. Mubarak lived with Murad before Murad had gone to the Philippines and plotted to blow up a bunch of airliners simultaneously. And, yes, Mubarak went to flight school. Agent Michael Mason, who headed the FBI’s Sacramento Office and then came to head Amerithrax, said “there were sufficient connections that necessitated his removal to another country.” “If he were a U.S. citizen, he might be walking around the [Sacramento] area today,” Mason said. “But .. inasmuch as his residency in this country was an issue, that just became another arrow in my quiver to neutralize the threat.” The same article also provides interesting examples of associates of the likes of 9/11 hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi, Almidhar, and Hani Hanjour, the hijackers who followed the 911 imam Aulaqi to Falls Church. “What we have over the U.S. is a net,” Mason has said. “At best, what we’re doing is shrinking the mesh in the net. We’re trying to kick down the door of the person who’s going to drive the truck loaded with explosives. But can we do it in time?” When I told Agent Mason that I thought Zawahiri was behind the anthrax mailings, he responded by email that the FBI had not reached any conclusion but was leaving no stone unturned. Whenever the all-too-familiar refrain was invoked, some needed convincing. Bill Walter, retired microbiologist and former scientist in the U.S. bioweapon program who had not been contacted, once commented: I read where they havent left a stone unturned. Theres about eight of us stones that are still unturned. Its a joke.

Numerous illustrious legal beagles have been hard at work developing an entire new field of science that would stand up to a withering OJ-worthy scrutiny. The book MICROBIAL FORENSICS “describes the new and growing field of Microbial Forensics-the science that will help bring to justice criminals and terrorists who use biological material to cause harm. This book describes the foundation of the field of microbial forensics and will serve as a basic primer to initiate those scientists and officials that have an interest in the topic. It covers a variety of areas from forensic science, to microbiology, to epidemiology, to bioinformatics, and to legal issues.”

Authors of the lead chapter “Microbial Forensics” include Bruce Budowie of the FBI Lab and James P. Burans. Burans, as honored by the Federal Bureau of Investigation at a Washington, D.C. ceremony in 2002 for his help during the anthrax attacks. He was a scientific consultant to the FBI on the analysis of the mailed anthrax. The Federal Law Enforcement Officer’s Association also named Burans Civilian of the Year for his assistance.

Names familiar to many who have followed Amerithrax closely include the author of “Bacterial Pathogens” Paul Keim, who has been part of FBI investigation working on the DNA sequencing of Ames and John Ezzell, author of the section on “Forensic handling of biological threat samples in the lab .”

The most interesting chapter is “Non-DNA methods for biological signatures” with a raft of authors.

“Population genetics of bacteria in a forensic context” may not pinpoint the lab, without more, but Paul Keim stands ready with co-author Richard E. Lenski to explain how it can narrow the field.

And to balance the pessimistic comments TrebleRebel above in this thread, about whether the science could prove the Amerithrax case, rounding out the text are articles reminiscent of OJ. Joseph M. Campos offers “Quality management in forensics laboratories.” Rock Harmon writes on “Admissibility standards for scientific evidence.” A former long-time Assistant District Attorney from California, Harmon helped develop the protocol to assist law enforcement agencies in solving previously unsolved cases through the use of DNA typing.

Working for the Homeland Security Department (”HSD”), the Biosecurity and Nanosciences Laboratory has built a computer database of biological signatures, an approach that in Amerithrax is complementary to Keim’s PCR technique, which focuses on DNA signatures. (PCR means polymerase chain reaction.) A detector using PCR amplifies a short stretch of a pathogens DNA to determine its characteristics. Dr Yoreo’s lab characterize, for example, single spores of anthrax with high sensitivity.

Internal newsletters indicate that the Lawrence Livermore was first enlisted to combat the Bin Laden anthrax threat in 1998 by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. And so although former FBI Lab Director Murch, who once played a key role in charting direction of DTRA research in 2001 and 2002 was quoted in a press account saying there is no “smoking gun” in Amerithrax, these young and talented folks at Lawrence Livermore keep looking.

Life continues to be a grand mystery. Answers are seldom going to be found in a book or on a webpage.

The indictment, in part, involves disclosure of technology re UAV technology to a graduate student. The Arms Export Control Act, discussed in the thesis supervised by the GMU Professor re the vulnerability of universities, is reason enough not to be discussing how best to weaponize anthax. That GMU PhD thesis found that no one at GMU was qualified to interpret and ensure that Arms Export Control prohibitions were followed. In December 2004, Ed interviewed a leading anthrax scientist at GMU. If more had been disclosed, and Ed as a fellow lay person did not have the expected tendency of confusing scientific matters, query whether there might have been an Arms Export Control violation. TrebleRebel criticizes Alibek for being fuzzy on details — or even misleading. That is not a particularly sound basis for criticism. If he had provided clear instruction on how best to weaponize anthrax to anyone prohibited under the Arms Export Control Act to receive such information, then he might be alleged to have violated the Arms Export Control Act.

Ali was a US Citizen and so the same logic under the Arms Export Control Act does not apply (if in fact he was allowed access to sensitive materials and know-how which the University’s PR person denies).

Rauf Ahmad, in contrast, wrote Ayman Zawahiri that he had learned some anthrax weaponization tricks from REDACTED. Who did he consult on how to weaponize anthrax? And why are TrebleRebel and Ed so willfully blind to the documentary evidence establishing that even by 1999 a scientist working for Zawahiri was consulting with UK or US (apparently) scientists on how best to consult anthrax? Why don’t they follow the evidence rather than their preconceptions? (Both formed their opinion of the matter before this documentary evidence was revealed). Ed doesn’t disclose such documentary evidence on his webpage let alone address it.

On your personal assurances you are no longer loyal to your Mother Country, I am going to reveal to you what Dr. Jahrling saw in the black spiral bound notebook inside the vault that day. At the beginning of the notebook was the class cheer of the third graduating class of Camp Detrick:

Condoleeza Rice addressed these bioterrorism issues in 1999 in “Introductory Remarks” in THE NEW TERROR: FACING THET THREAT OF BIOLOCIAL AND CHEMICAL WARFARE (1999):

“One Sunday in November 1998, ‘Meet the Press’ viewers watched as Secretary of Defense William Cohen told that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was trying to develop a massive biological and chemical weapons (BCW) capability. Cohen set a familiar yellow bag of Domino sugar in front of him, and noted that just that amount of anthrax could effectively poison the water supply of the City of New York.

[Shame on KSM for implying it was his idea].

Cohen wanted to garner public support for air strikes against Hussein in retaliaton for his refusal to permit UN inspections of suspected production sites for BCW. Cohen did something else, entirely, however — he reminded the people of their vulnerability to biological and chemical attacks, a vulnerability that today seems absolute.”

Rice continued:

“To date, there has been more heat than light on the subject of the BCW threat. It is all too early to let one’s imagination run so far and so fast that the standard problems of security appear insurmountable.”

She noted: “The human assets likely to be involved in BCW intelligence may be even more unsavory. Can we stomach those associations?”

So Seikaly was leaking Hatfills name to the media for years - and he knew some other guys name all along?

If you have to distort the facts to make an argument, it just proves that you don't have a valid argument.

1. Seikaly wasn't leaking Hatfill's name for years. Hatfill became a public name in early July of 2002. The Newsweek article that used Seikaly's leak was printed in mid-August of 2002. So, Seikaly was leaking information about Hatfill for less than two months.

2. There's no reason to believe that Seikaly EVER knew the name of any other suspect or possible suspect in the Amerithrax investigation.

Lambert gave judge Walton a briefing 3 years ago - with super secret information (presumably including this imaginary other persons name) - and Walton laughed him out of court.

Lambert evidently told Judge Walton about what evidence they expected to obtain via the new science of microbial forensics. Judge Walton evidently (rightly) believed that it would take YEARS for microbial forensics to be validated for use in court. There's no reason to presume that Judge Walton was ever given any suspect's name.

The congress are holding the FBIs feet to the fire - Mueller may lose his job - but they have this other guys name - its not Hatfill, its not Berry - but for some reason they did NOT go public with this name. Right!

Right! They've stated many times that they were investigating 10 to 20 different people. The only names which you mention are Hatfill and Berry, but that was NOT because the FBI named them, it was because the media named them when public searches were done. MANY other searches were done. The FBI has not identified whose homes or labs were searched, but the media has mentioned a few. The media just hasn't focused on the others they knew about.

The FBI doesn't identify potential suspects unless those suspects are wanted for questioning, are fleeing arrest or have been arrested.

It would be totally irresponsible (AND PROBABLY ILLEGAL) for the FBI to name a suspect in the Amerithrax investigation if they don't have enough solid evidence to make an arrest. (That's the basis for Dr. Hatfill's lawsuit!) NEITHER Hatfill nor Berry was offically identified as a "suspect" by the FBI. The FBI officially stated MANY times that Hatfill was NOT a suspect, and they stated that Berry was being investigated to clear him, presumably because the same conspiracy theorists who pointed the finger at Hatfill were also pointing the finger at Berry.

“In a democracy such as ours, there is no substitute for open and honest dialog about the impact of what we do on our laws and our values. Without that, no leader can pursue a coherent strategy confident of the support of the people.”

“No one would suggest the US become ‘Fortress America’ in order diminish the BCW threat, no matter how grave... Yet, improved intelligence in countering the threat does raise uncomfortable questions.” (p. 400)

There was a conference on countering biological terrorism in 1999 sponsored by the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, reported in
COUNTERING BIOLOGICAL TERRORISM IN THE U.S.: AN UNDERSTANDING OF ISSUES AND STATUS.

Dr. Alibek was introduced thusly:

“Dr. Llewellyn: This is rather strange because I just met Dr. Alibek today. He was introduced to me by Dr. Charlie Bailey, who now works for SRA. But Charlie and I were associated with the Army Medical Research and Development Command Defense Program for over 20 years.
***
Dr. Alibek: Thank you very much for your attention.” (at p. 311).

I have one of those uncomfortable questions Dr. Rice mentioned. Is that a typo? Isn’t SRA who Al-Timimi worked for 1999 where he had a high security clearance for work for the Navy? See Milton Viorst’s article “The Education of Ali Al-Timimi. Did Dr. Bailey also work there at SRA in 1999? Did they work together? When I emailed Dr. Bailey in December 2007 to confirm Ali had the room right near his at Discovery Hall he politely referred me to counsel and took no questions. Dr. Alibek and Dr. Popov have told me that Ali is not known to have worked on any biodefense project. Dr. Popova told me I should direct any such questions to Dr. Bailey. Dr. Bailey told me I should direct any questions to University counsel. University counsel declined to answer any questions.

“[T]he anthrax spore preparations in the last two of the mailings, out of probably five letters total, were of extraordinary high quality. [citing Matsumoto] ... [T]he preparation may have been treated with silica to present electrostatic clumping. This is a highly sophisticated method of spore preparation, widely thought to be beyond the capability of anyone not specifically trained to prepare it. Very few people in the world have such training; most of them are current or past Ph.D-level employees of the US or Soviet BW program or biodefense programs.”

The quote is in a chapter by Wheelis and Sugishima in Wheelis et al, DEADLY CULTURES: BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS SINCE 1945 (2006)

“Militant groups are wary of becoming alienated from the people... Since their strategy is premised on target specificity, it is unlikely that they would resort to the use of any weapon that would result in indiscriminate deaths. For this reason, it is unlikely that they would use biological weapons or agents.”

“Non-State actors in South Asia: Who Will Use Bio-Weapons and Against Whom,” by Suba Chandran, in “BIO-TERRORISM AND BIODEFENSE,” (2005)

“There is no way to sugar coat it: Ali Mohamed is a window on breathtaking government incompetence. I raised holy hell ... that I strongly suspected Mohamed was a terrorist, that the FBI should be investigating him rather than allowing him to infiltrate as a source ... Because, you know what they say IMAGINE THE LIABILITY.

In December 2001, the CIA obtained the record of a request by Ayman Zawahiri to Al Qaeda’s military commander, Egyptian Mohammed Atef, for a book that extensively featured Dr. Ken Alibek and discussed the method of microencapsulation, the method used to weaponize the Daschle and Leahy anthrax.

As Professor Turley at GWU, who represents “anthrax weapons suspect” Al-Timimi infers, the FBI and CIA very likely were enthused at the prospect of continuing a FISA warrant on Ali Al-Timimi’s phone and email to pursue this lead.

According to Ali’s lawyer, he was in contact with folks associated with Al Qaeda’s network including Bin Laden’s sheik (the subject of Bin Laden’s 1996 declaration of war) immediately before and after the first anthrax mailing. According to his lawyer, Ali even met with the “911 imam” to discuss a planned hand delivery of a warning to every member of Congress on the first anniversary of the anthrax letters to the Senators.

Now when Ali would go to London to lecture at JIMAS (such as in the Summer of 2001), was he also in touch with Abu Musab al-Suri? Al-Suri, now captured, was in touch with Zawahiri and reportedly worked with Midhat Mursi on poisons. The red headed al-Suri had located his London front not from Ayman’s friends who led the London cell and then were detained in 1998 after they faxed claim of responsibility for the 1998 embassy bombings in which a couple hundred died. (Abdel-Bari is subject to extradition as is Al-Sirri, who was working closely with the blind sheik’s liasion, Postal employee Abdel Sattar. The London-based redheaded Al-Suri posted instructions purporting to explain how to weaponize plague. Although he was a propagandist, not a microbiologist, didn’t he know fellow propagandist, microbiologist Ali Al-Timimi, who came to London to lecture about ideological differences that divided the salafi-jihadis there?

The book that Ayman asked Atef to get (and it is sold by Amazon) explains:

“This coating process - called microencapsulation - is also considered evidence of possible Soviet assistance, since only the Soviets and Americans (before 1969) managed to coat...” (p. 330)

The authors interviewed both Dr. Alibek and Dr. Bailey (and specifically acknowledged their help). They explained:

“Dr. Malcolm Dando, the distinguished biologist and Professor of International Security at the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford, Englad, talks of microencapsulation, a process by which BW agents can be coated and protected against a variety of harmful outside factors... This process also allows agents to survive longer and to be inhaled more easily, which increases the likeihood of infection and death. Currently, the detection and identification of microencapsulated BW agents is more difficult than for non-encapsulated materials. The Soviets crossed this scientific threshold years ago and were able to ‘spray’ their bacterial and viral agents that were resistant to the sun’s rays.)”

The authors continued:

“In fact, microencapsulation can already be tailored for the mission. For example, you can apply one coating for added protection from heat, and then another one for the effects of sunlight. A germ would need both coatings if it were packed inside a missile warhead and then had to survive explosive decompression at its target, together with sudden exposure to sunlight.”

Thus, when Ken Alibek described the usefulness of a coating to FreeRepublic poster Ed where packed in a missile head, he was only telling half the story (either Ken was only telling half the story or Ed has selectively quoted him out of context). A coating also serves to allow it to be inhaled more easily and increases the likelihood of infection and death and makes it better able to survive its environment. It is used in pharmaceuticals and functional animal feedstuffs, for example, to avoid the destruction by enzymes before reaching the target organ.

A thesis written by Dr. Alibek’s assistant — who the directory from 2002 shows was a couple doors away from Ali Al-Timimi — says if silica was detected it would have been used for this purpose of encapsulation. The author, Dr. Crockett, also acknowledges the help of FBI’s Amerithrax consultant, William Patrick. There was more than one bioweapons thesis by an assistant to Dr. Alibek at GMU’s Center for Biodefense that thanked Dr. Patrick.

Dr. Treble Rebel, who has posted in this thread above and long festering debate with Ed is expert in coating with silica to include the method used by DARPA in coating phosphors (for which I’ve provided a link previously). He is not a microbiologist but Treble knows silica coatings. Rebel knew of this other reason of coating and has tried to explain it to Ed. But Ed has been distracted by arcane lay discussion of the basic science. Even life scientists, from their different perspective, view the purpose of the coating as relating to the hydrophobocity of the water and are not troubled by distinctions TrebleRebel, who is not a microbiologist but is a chemical engineer, draws between electrostatic charges and Vander Waals forces. That just is a difference in perspective, not in substance. The details don’t matter as nearly as much as the identity of the devil provably behind the anthrax.

Ed Lake’s misconceived vitriolic attack on Gary Matsumoto’s SCIENCE article that made these points led to a half-decade dispute with TrebleRebel that has shed far more heat than light because of Ed’s totally unnecessary confusion that such coatings were not used in this manner and for this specific purpose. The CIA and FBI knew as early as December 2001 about the use of microencapsulation. The forensic finding set the respective squads off in alternative investigative directions. One squad focused on, for example, Hatfill, friend of William Patrick who might have learned a trick or two. Another squad focused on Al-Timimi, who also might have learned a trick or two from the same fount of knowledge — given he shared the same water fountain with Dr. Alibek and Dr. Bailey. In fact, curiously, it now appears that both Al-Timimi and Dr. Bailey worked at SRA International before GMU. Al-Timimi had a high security clearance for work with the Navy at SRA. See Milton Viorst, “The Education of Ali Al-Timimi.” I spoke to Ali’s wife, who is wonderful, but until and unless cleared by counsel, she is not able to discuss why Ali had a high security clearance for mathematical support work for the Navy while at SRA.

Ayman’s requests to Atef had included publications not only on anthrax, but botulinum and plague. There is every reason to think that Abu Musab al-Suri’s web discussion of biological weapons stemmed from the work Zawahiri and Midhat Mursi were doing. See Architect of Global Jihad: The Life of Al Qaeda Strategist Abu Musab al-Suri by Brynjar Lia. The section at Weapons of Mass Destruction is at 169-176. See also Steve Coll and Susan B. Glasser “Terrorists Turn to the Web as Base of Operations,” Washington Post Staff Writers, Sunday, August 7, 2005; Page A01http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/05/AR2005080501138.html
(”Biological Weapons” was the stark title of a 15-page Arabic language document posted two months ago on the Web site of al Qaeda fugitive leader Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, one of the jihadist movement’s most important propagandists, often referred to by the nom de guerre Abu Musab Suri. His document described “how the pneumonic plague could be made into a biological weapon,” if a small supply of the virus could be acquired, according to a translation by Rebecca Givner-Forbes, an analyst at the Terrorism Research Center, an Arlington firm with U.S. government clients. Nasar’s guide drew on U.S. and Japanese biological weapons programs from the World War II era and showed “how to inject carrier animals, like rats, with the virus and how to extract microbes from infected blood . . . and how to dry them so that they can be used with an aerosol delivery system.”)

Here are some of the publications Ayman sought:

Adams, James, The New Spies: Exploring the Frontiers of Espionage (1994)

Adams, James, The New Spies: Exploring the Frontiers of Espionage (1994) was cited in PLAGUE WARS, not in Ayman’s memo to Atef requesting books.
Ayman himself wrote the book(let) on espionage — titled “Covert Operations.”

Here are excerpts, for example, from a talk Ali gave in London about how in going about establishing Islam in the West, fiqh (the law of islamic jurisprudence) needs to be suitable to the time and place.

“It brings great pleasure to my heart to be once again with my brothers and sisters in the United Kingdom. This being my second participation at a JIMAS conference here in Leicester having been here four years ago.”

With that being said, we do have todays lecture before us and it has been entitled Our Need for a Fiqh Suitable to Our Time and Place. Now as we take a moment to think about the title of this lecture, even though it is a bit lengthy, it is important that we do not forget the conference theme to which this lecture is one part, specifically, Establishing Islam in the West in the Way of the Pious Predecessors. The title lecture and the conference theme are such that they are inseparable.
***

“Should the military expedition prepared for Byzantium sent forth?
The Prophet had prepared an army to go forth toward Syria to fight the Byzantine Christians. The army was ready to leave Medina when the Prophet died.

The question the Companions faced was should the army continue forth or should it be diverted to deal with the apostates.”
***
“Yet while all these crises occurred at one time... our pious forefathers... found solutions to them and were able to deal effectively deal with them. Even though with many of these cases there were not direct texts from the Qur’an and the Sunna to show how to deal with these issues.”
****
“So therefore issues regarding jihad, how are the shares to be divided between the mujahidin. The classical books will discuss the share of a person riding a horse versus the share of a person on foot deriving those rulings from the Sunna of the Prophet. But you will find not find them discussing the share of a fighter pilot or a person riding in a tank because these issues, of course, did not exist in time. Modern warfare did not exist during those times when they wrote those classical books of fiqh.”
***
“One illustration is the application of the hudud on the battlefield, like whipping the one who drinks alcohol. We know that the punishment for intoxication is lashing.”

Ali continued: “Yet the scholars have understood that on the battlefield, the hudud are not to be applied.”

“Why? Not because we are negligent with Allah’s sharia; but because the greater benefit [establishing a Worldwide Caliphate] dictates otherwise. If you are on the battlefield and attempt to apply the hudud on your sinful soldiers; they might out of anger (as they are now an object of punishment because of their crime) decide to go to the ranks of enemies.”

[Having been questioned by the FBI and Secret Service a couple years earlier in connection with WTC 1993, Ali can appreciate that anyone questioned might cooperate with the FBI if they get pissed at the powers-that-be.]

“Zheludeva’s death has nothing to do with the envelope,” said Vasily Ryabchenkov, deputy director for science at the Shubnikov Institute of Crystallography, Interfax reported Monday.

“The letter was scientific correspondence. We receive dozens of such letters every day,” he said.

On May 8, Zheludeva opened the letter containing the powder, which was addressed to institute director Mikhail Kovalchuk, according to media reports. After receiving the letter, the institute called police, and the powder was taken for analysis. Zheludeva fell sick five days later.

A hospital source told Interfax that Zheludeva had suffered multiple organ failure and that her liver, kidneys, lungs, heart and brain were severely damaged.

***
One longtime colleague of Zheludeva’s said Monday that he did not believe she was poisoned. “It was just an unlucky coincidence,” Pavel Fyodorov, a physicist who worked at the Shubnikov Institute for 33 years, said by telephone.

“I think she got an infection of some sort,” Fyodorov said.

Russia’s chief public health officer, Gennady Onishchenko, said Sunday that the white powder was a harmless substance. “We did the analysis of the powder and the results were negative,” he said, Interfax reported.

A month after his colleague’s residence was searched, I questioned Dr. Alibek about silica trying to understand why authorities had arrested an affiliate as a material witness in a charity investigation. The transcript is below — from a Washington Post online chat. The scientist I was curious about was an animal geneticist / food researcher who mixed silica in making animal feedstuffs whose supervisor consulted (doing statistical work) on a US Army funded device called the Microbial Vac. The Microbial Vac concentrated anthrax by a factor of ten and sequentially filtered it. The PhD was expert at mixing with silica. The inventor of the Microbial Vac says it could be used to weaponize anthrax but only on a small scale. The FBI didn’t question him and the magistrate made them relax the conditions of his home confinement. He lived about a mile from me. Much later I called the PhD and he thanked me for my concern but said too much was going on to talk. So I really know very little about the fellow. But below is the transcript where I interrogate Dr. Alibek on the technical issues.

With respect to the anthrax mailings, do you agree that the electrostatic charge was not removed? And that small scale production is indicated? And with respect to your letter to the editor to The Washington Post (with Dr. Meselson), could you explain your view for the reason silica was detected in the anthrax? How do you explain the floatability? Under all the circumstances, do you believe the science points away from (or toward) a state sponsored program? Relatedly, do you feel al Qaeda is responsible (with or without help from a state-employed scientist)? Finally, do you feel you have a sufficient basis to form an expert opinion on these particular issues (based on what you have been able to see)?

Ken Alibek: We need to understand that there is no specific technological procedure to remove electric charges. All discussions about to remove or not remove are absolutely senseless. Yes, electric charges could decrease it, but there’s not specific.

These anthrax mailings create electric charge and this went through mail machines and had friction, so to say they didn’t have an electric charge is not right.

To talk about silica, when I’ve looked at micrographs, I haven’t seen any silica in the samples. We shouldn’t forget that silica could be contained in an outer shell of an anthrax spore. Based on this information its hard to see if it is foreign or domestic. What you can see is that there was a lot of incorrect info published in the media. This anthrax wasn’t sophisticated, didn’t have coatings, had electric charge and many other things.

We can form an expert opinion on what kind of anthrax it was, but based on this data, we can’t say what the source was.”

Then a friend of mine from Dallas asked (if he’s Abbott, I’m Costello):

“Dallas, Tex.: A published analysis of the anthrax mailed to government and media in Oct. 2001 shows unambiguously that silicon dioxide was present on the surface of the spores. The work was performed by the AFIP and the results can be seen here.
Does this mean, in your opinion, that the anthrax was made in a state-sponsored bioweapons lab?

Ken Alibek: We paid to much attention to the silicon oxide on the surface of the spores. I haven’t seen any silicon presence on micrographs of this anthrax. We shouldn’t forget that silica would be a natural component. In this case, in my opinion, silica was a natural presence in these spores. There was no special need to add silica to this anthrax.

Ken Alibek: Presence or absence of silica says nothing about whether it was state sponsored. It’s very hard from technical characteristics to make conclusions about possible source. That’s why in my opinion, we should focus on two major directions. We have to do technical examination — equipment, source of the spores. And regular interrogation. Interview people who could be sources of valuable information. One more thing, we need to investigate how — we know when these letters have been sent and locations and we need to check and see what people would be at that location at a certain time. It should be more technical issues, though.”

Then I got really clever and went anonymous, disguising myself as “Somewhere, USA” (It reminds me of the Indy movie where the fellow who betrays Indy says “I lied about being a double agent.”)

“Somewhere, USA: Would silica be detected (in a comparable manner as in the product used in the anthrax mailings in the U.S.) if the instructions for bacillus thuringiensis were followed, such as described in the UN’s description by the Food and Agriculture Organization below? Is bacteriologist Abdul Qadoos Khan, in whose home Khalid Mohammed was reportedly arrested, expert in the production of B.T. from his work for the UN in Sudan and Zambia? What was the field of expertise of that bacteriologist?

Product Harvesting and Formulation of Microbial Insecticide.

Ken Alibek: Again, I said before that silica could be naturally present in spores. In this case, we shouldn’t over focus on silica. There are many other parameters and issues we need to pay attention to.”

On the very next question, I uncloaked again:

“Syracuse, N.Y.: In the Air Force Journal, May 2002, DOD’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency Younger said that essentially the same process to make powderized anthrax is used to make dried milk. Could someone expert in making dried milk make the product used in the Daschle and Leahy letters?

Ken Alibek: Let me answer it this way — yes, actually, it would be the same technique to make a powderized anthrax, but at the same time we shouldn’t overestimate the complexity of making it. My opinion is this — in order to make this powder there is no need to have sophisticated equipment. Such a small amount, keep in mind that the people who did it could have very simple equipment and very simple procedures. There is no need for industrial equipment. It would be enough to have small equipment. But at the same time, when people talk about it being “weaponized” — I can’t say it was that sophisticated. I saw the particles — they were the size of 40 microns. We can’t say anything about the quality of this powder because we saw it after it had gone through mail sorting machines which create very powerful pressure. There was no coating. What I saw on micrograph was no coating. It was natural spores and for some people they mistakenly thought it wasn’t. Some experts said there was more charge because it was fluffy and made a cloud when put on scale. This is another mistake. It did have charge. IT went through the sorting machine and it’s a matter of friction. In this case, it meant that this powder had the same electric charge — this is normal. In this case, I would say it’s a long story, but there have been so many mistakes made in the conclusions, but I hope these mistakes were just in the media, but not the case with the FBI and do know more information.”

Bottom-line: Ken knew about the raid of his colleague whose office was about 15 feet from him. It had been the month before and the subject of national press. He was sensitive on the issue of silica because he and Dr. Bailey had filed a March 2001 patent and the department had know-how relating to microencapsulation. Ed is a lay person. So when he uses his impressive bold, red font — you will ignore it if you have any sense. Ed doesn’t have the relevant training and doesn’t know what he is talking about. My consulting military scientist who makes anthrax simulant for a living says that the patent (there is a related patent also that involves removing the silica) is an encapsulation patent — which is precisely the method that Zawahiri read about in 1999 in the book about Ken. Ken and Charles are not to blame. Hindsight is 20/20. Ayman is a clever guy.

1. The fact is that after September 11, whatever was legal in the face of not just the attacks, but the anthrax attacks that happened, we were in an environment in which saving America from the next attack was paramount,” Rice told an audience at the headquarters of Google Inc. during a visit to California.http://www.rttnews.com/Content/PoliticalNews.aspx?Node=B1&Id=613940

2. “The evidence that Dr. al-Timimi was subject to undisclosed surveillance is obvious,” Turley wrote, citing the fact that al-Timimi was interviewed by the FBI in 1994 in its investigation of the first World Trade Center bombing, as well as the fact that al-Timimi was explicitly mentioned in the notorious Presidential Daily Briefing of August 2001 titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.”
Source: Judge: Too many classified documents in Va. treason case
By MATTHEW BARAKAT | Associated Press Writer
May 16, 2008

He was sensitive on the issue of silica because he and Dr. Bailey had filed a March 2001 patent and the department had know-how relating to microencapsulation. Ed is a lay person. So when he uses his impressive bold, red font  you will ignore it if you have any sense. Ed doesnt have the relevant training and doesnt know what he is talking about.

I may not have training in reading patents, but I have plenty of experience in reading patents. I even have a patent of my own. My patent actually includes 3 patentable ideas, but I filed them as one patent because it was cheaper to file them as one patent.

The patent is for a bi-directional hydraulic flow meter. I had no training in hydraulics when my brother died and I had to take over the running of his company. Our customers were asking for bi-directional flow meters, but we didn't have any. So, I invented one about 3 months after taking over the running of the company and after 3 months of experience in dealing with matters related to hydraulics. The patent went through in near-record time and without dispute.

Also, my brother was sued for patent infringement. After his death, I had to work with his lawyer to dig through the other company's patent and through all related patents to find the evidence that the other company's patent was actually a violation of a third company's patent. As a result of that finding, the patent lawsuit against my brother and his company was dropped (but not before $80,000 in lawyers fees had accumulated).

Alibek's patent is about encapsulating droplets of nutrients in which multiple bacteria are allowed to grow. It has NOTHING to do with spores. It has NOTHING to do with encapsulating spores.

If your consulting military scientist says it does, he's full of Pook poop.

Since I've gotten into the subject of my experience with hydraulic flow meters, I've got another anecdote for you:

About four months after my brother died and after I took over the running of his company, I got a call from one of America's top corporations. They wanted to buy over a million dollars worth of a new flow meter my brother had showed them.

But we didn't make it. All I had was a prototype, enough parts to make two more, and some handwritten notes about how the prototype worked. (My brother was the founder of his company and its only engineer.) The prototype used a circuit board that was ALSO a prototype, and we had no other flow meters that used circuit boards.

So, I had to "reverse engineer" it to figure out how it worked and how to put it into production. I also had to write the instruction manual that went with it.

We went into production about two months before the company was sold. The last flow meter for that order was shipped a few weeks before I turned the company over to the new owner and left.

So, while I have no "training" in "reverse engineering," I know a little bit about it through experience. That little episode was about the most complicated thing I've ever done in my life that didn't involve computer systems. (I once worked for a statistics company whose production line was a computer system that I had to renovate. Now THAT was complicated.) These things required a hellofa lot more analysis than reading a patent to see that it's about a method of growing bacteria and not about encapsulating spores.

I believe a 4 part miniseries ANDROMEDA strain starts Monday on A&E, I believe. A virus comes from parts unknown — or maybe just perhaps from our future. A reporter tries to expose the mystery behind the virus and the government cover-up of the origin of the pathogen.

I believe a 4 part miniseries ANDROMEDA strain starts Monday on A&E, I believe.

It's evidently a new 2-part miniseries version of the Michael Crichton novel "The Andromeda Strain" which was made into a movie back in 1971. Hopefully, it will also be updated -- although the movie still holds up pretty well.

“8. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM). Reportedly the third most important figure in al-Qaeda, after Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, KSM, who was captured in Pakistan in March 2003, and the four men described below are among the 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006 after being held for years in secret prisons run by the CIA. KSM confessed in his military tribunal in Guantánamo last year (convened to confirm that he was an “enemy combatant” who could be tried by Military Commission) that he was “responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z.”

US citizen and NYC resident Uzair Paracha, when arrested, said he had met in February 2003 a chemistry professor who was supposed to help Al Qaeda with biological and chemical weapons. It was a big break, therefore, when the son of the imprisoned blind sheik, Abdel Rahman, was captured in Quetta, Pakistan in mid-February 2003 and KSM was captured no later than the beginning of March. Mohammed Abdel-Rahman from Aghanistan had spoken alongside Ali Al-Timimi at IANA conferences in 1993 and 1996. The blind sheik’s son Mohammed Abdel-Rahman had recently had been in contact with Khalid Mohammed, Al Qaeda’s #3, who goes before a military tribunal this year. Two weeks after Abdel-Rahman’s capture, authorities raided microbiologist Ali Al-Timimis townhouse in Alexandria, VA, and searched the residence of a couple of PhD level drying experts in Idaho and Upstate NY, along with various others associated with IANA. Mohammed Abdel-Rahman then provided information that led authorities to the home of the bacteriologist that had harbored KSM. Anthrax spray drying documents were found, both on a computer and in hard copy.

In June 2003, a UN report explained that Al-Qaeda has a WMD Committee, which according to the report, is known to have approached a number of Muslim scientists to assist the terrorist network with the creation and procurement of chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons. Mohammed Abdel Rahman, a member of the 3-member WMD committee, knew Ali Al-Timimi. Ali Al-Timimi conducted a summer camp at a park in Frederick, Maryland over the years. The FBI searched the parks ponds more than once claiming that Dr. Hatfill had once suggested that someone could weaponize anthrax and discard the equipment in a pond.

Mohammed Abdel-Rahman is one of the missing prisoners whose absence from Guantanamo leads human rights researchers to believe that the CIA is still operating secret prisons.

The very well-informed Pakistani journalist Zahid Hussain says in his book, Frontline Pakistan that KSM was actually captured in February from a house in Quetta  presumably the same one where Abdel-Rahman was captured. Supposedly he had been tracked for four weeks before that. Zahid Hussain says that they did not make his arrest public because they wanted to capture other al-Qaeda members or sympathizers, such as the Qadoos family. This would be consistent with the strident denials by the bacteriologists family that KSM was captured at their home.

The timing of the raid on Al-Timimis house two weeks later  and the arrest of animal geneticist and experienced PhD researcher expert at mixing with silica  suggests that it was connected. The FBI had been engaged in surveillance and trashing and interception of targets related to the charity for many months. The investigation — including arrests, searches, and some convictions — apparently did not produce any prosecutable evidence of anyone’s involvement in Amerithrax. The timing of the February 26, 2003 raids, however, perhaps related to what Mohammed Abdel-Rahman and KSM told authorities, for example, about various people in the US to include Aafia Siddiqui. Aafia was connected to the blind sheiks Al Kifah organization. An AUSA has said that Aafia was prepared to participate in an anthrax attack if asked. She opened up a mailbox in Gaithersburg, Maryland as part of operations.

The Washington Post explained that “What the documents and debriefings show, the first official said, is that “KSM was involved in anthrax production, and [knew] quite a bit about it.” Barton Gellman in the Post explained that Al Qaeda had recruited competent scientists, including a Pakistani microbiologist who the officials declined to name. “The documents describe specific timelines for producing biochemical weapons and include a bar graph depicting the parallel processes that must take place between Days 1 and 31 of manufacture. Included are inventories of equipment and indications of readiness to grow seed stocks of pathogen in nutrient baths and then dry the resulting liquid slurry into a form suitable for aerosol dispersal.” The Washington Post story notes that U.S. officials said the evidence does not indicate whether al Qaeda completed manufacture. The documents are undated and unsigned and cryptic about essential details.

Worthington writes:

“10. Mustafa al-Hawsawi. A Saudi, who was captured with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al-Hawsawi is accused of sourcing funding for the 9/11 attacks from Dubai. In his tribunal at Guantánamo, he admitted providing support for jihadists, including transferring money for some of the 9/11 hijackers, although he denied that he was a member of al-Qaeda. Last week, his lawyer, Army Maj. Jon Jackson, sought fruitlessly to delay his arraignment, in particular because he has only been allowed to meet his client twice, and “has not received any potential evidence against al-Hawsawi supporting charges that ‘allege a complex conspiracy spanning several years,’” as the Associated Press put it.”

Comment on al-Hawsawi’s anthrax connection:

On March 23, 2003, the Washington Post reported on documents allegedly discovered at the Abdul Qadoos Khan residence — on a seized laptop — relating to biochemical weapons. The documents indicated that Al Qaeda leaders may already have manufactured some of them. The documents at the Qadoos home reveal that Al Qaeda had a feasible production plan for anthrax. Confronted with scanned handwritten notes on the computer, Khalid Mohammed reportedly began to talk about Al Qaeda’s anthrax production program. KSM, however, denies that it was his computer — he says it was the computer of Mustafa Hawsawi, who was captured at the home the same day. In 2001, before departing for the UAE, Al-Hawsawi had worked in the Al Qaeda media center (Al Sahab (Clouds) in Kandahar. The letter containing the first anthrax went to the American Media in Florida had blue and pink clouds on it.

Hawsawi worked under KSM who in turn worked for Zawahiri. Al-Hawsawi was a facilitator for the 9/11 attacks and its paymaster, working from the United Arab Emirates, sending thousands to Bin Al-Shibh in the summer of 2001. After 9/11, he returned to Afghanistan where he met separately with Bin Laden, Zawahiri and spokesman Abu Ghaith. KSM worked closely with al-Hawsawi and it would make perfect sense that the computer actually belonged to al-Hawsawi. The fact that the anthrax spray drying documents were on that computer, however, and that he had worked for Al Sahab in Kandahar in 2000, serves to suggest that the undated documents predated 9/11, particularly given that extremely virulent anthrax was later found in Kandahar (according to Ron Suskind in ONE PERCENT SOLUTION). At the same time, it suggests that Al-Hawsawi has personal knowledge relevant to anthrax. Al-Hawawi in turn worked with Aafia Siddiqui’s husband-to-be, KSM’s nephew Al-Baluchi, in the UAE in the summer of 2001 providing logistical support for the hijackers.

Hawsawi worked as a financial manager for Bin Laden when he was in Sudan. He was associated with Egyptian Islamic Jihad shura leader Mahjoub, who was Bin Laden’s farm manager in Sudan. Mahjoub was the subject of the anthrax threat in January 2001 in Canada, upon announcement of his bail hearing. See early February 2001 PDB about this. The day after Mahjoub’s bail was denied on October 5, 2001, the potent stuff was sent to US Senators Daschle and Leahy.

In addition to establishing him as paymaster for the hijackers, Al-Hawsawi’s computer disks reportedly also included lists of contributors worldwide, to include bank account numbers and names of organizations that have helped finance terror attacks. In press accounts, one unnamed government official confirmed that the information has yielded the identities of about a dozen suspected terrorists in the US.

In his substituted testimony in the Moussaoui case, Al-Hawsawi says he became part of Al Qaeda’s media committee in Afghanistan in about July 2000, and KSM joined the committee in February 2001. Hawsawi lived at the media office. For about 4-5 months in 2000, Hawsawi worked as a secretary on al Qaeda’s media committee. Hawsawi’s role “was to copy compact discs and reprint articles for the brothers at the guesthouse in Qandahar. After 2000, Hawsawi worked at the direction of Sheikh Mohammed, transferring funds, and procuring goods.”

The first time that Hawsawi was asked to be come involved in operational activities was about March 2001, when he took his second trip to the UAE. Although Sheikh Mohammed did not use the word “operation,” Sheikh Mohammed told Hawsawi that he would be purchasing items, receiving and possibly sending money, and possibly meeting individuals whom Hawsawi would contact or who would contact him.

Sheik Mohammed told Hawsawi that he would be in contact with individuals called ‘Abd Al-Rahman (Muhammad Atta) and the “Doctor” (Nawaf al-Hazmi). Atta called Hawsawi four times while in the US. Hawsawi says he was never in contact with Hani or Nawaf while in the US. On September 9, Ramzi bin Shibh told him the date of the planned operation and urged that he return to Pakistan. He flew out on 9/11 and after a night in Karachi, flew on to Quetta.

Hawsawi stated repeatedly that he never conducted any activity of any type with or on behalf of Moussaoui and had no knowledge of who made Moussaoui’s travel arrangements. Documents reportedly show that al-Hawsawi worked with the Dublin cell to finance Moussaouis international travel. Hamid Aich was an EIJ operative there who once had lived with Ressam, the so-called millennium bomber, in Canada.

The indictment of Zacarias Moussaoui named al-Hawsawi as an unindicted co-conspirator. Moussaou had tried to call KSM and Hawsawi as witnessses. Al-Timimi discussed helping with Moussaoui’s defense with Bin Laden’s sheik al-Hawali by telephone.

One reason not to underestimate al-Hawsawi’s possible role in an anthrax operation is his contact with al-Marri. Al-Marri, who entered the country on September 10, 2001, was researching chemicals in connection with a “second wave.” Al-Marri was also drafting emails to KSM. Although al-Marri denies being in contact with Hawsawi, phone records show otherwise. Email evidence also confirms messages drafted by al-Marri to KSM. An article this year by Susan Schmidt of the Washington Post on al-Marri notes that al-Marri picked up $13,000 in cash from al-Hawsawi. Al-Marri made the mistake of opening the briefcase containing the money in bundles and peeling off a few hundred dollars to pay his bail after being stopped on a traffic charge a couple days after 9/11. After casing targets in NYC, al-Marri had his computer sent to someone in Washington.

KSM admitted to being ‘’directly in charge’’ of ‘’managing and following up on the Cell for the Production of Biological Weapons, such as anthrax and others, and following up on Dirty Bomb Operations on American Soil.’’

There was a FrontPage article this week that discussed Adnan El-Shukrijumah and Jdey in the context of a dirty bomb cell.

I don’t know what to make of it. Putting aside the events at the Canadian university (McMasters), it seems that the eyewitness account of both El-Shukrijumah and Jdey at a Denny’s in Avon, Colorado is pretty thin. An eyewitness account, without more, seems very weak, especially given reports that Jdey and his sidekick Boussara entered Turkey in 2002. Touring Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park this week, everyone in the van had a different guess as to the identification of the bull deer we were looking at.

“According to the New York Daily News and its sources, the captive KSM told his interrogators that Osama bin Laden was planning a nuclear hell storm in America. *** KSMs recovered laptop had corroborating details.

The agents learned that the chain of command for this new operation went simply: bin Laden, his terrorist doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri, a mysterious scientist named Dr. X, and an operational coordinator. The scientist turned out to be Dr. A.Q. Khan, the founder of Pakistans atomic bomb, national hero, and nuke material proliferator extraordinaire. The operations ringleader was known as Jafer the Pilot (Jaffer al-Tayyar). This ID was corroborated by former al-Qaeda No. 3 Abu Zubaydah when he himself was waterboarded.

Dr. Khans input was important: One month before 9/11, according to The Washington Post, bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, met around a blazing campfire with Pakistani scientists from an A.Q. Khan-affiliated group called Umma Tameer-E-Nau, to discuss how al-Qaeda could build a nuclear device themselves and ship it to a target.

The night meeting went well. ‘Jafer the Pilot” is the nom de guerre of U.S. citizen Adnan el-Shukrijumah. Young, intelligent, fluent in multiple languages and a trained jet pilot who had apparently been in flight schools with Mohammed Atta, Shukrijumah had studied and worked with other jihadis at the 5-megawatt nuclear reactor at McMaster University in Canada. But one day all the terrorists disappeared from campus forever.

***

One thing is certain: homicidal doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri’s made a decision when KSM was captured: Cancel that planned mass cyanide gas attack in the New York subway system. He told the operational plotters to stand down because “we have something better in mind, which would presumably suck up all the resources then available to him. What would be better than a mass cyanide attack in a confined urban rush-hour space? There is only one thing more murderous.”

Additional comment: I don’t think think a dirty bomb attack is the only thing more murderous than a cyanide attack in a subway.

Bottom-line: The recent report seems to provide corroboration for the suggestion that the Jafar the Pilot letter (among the Harmony Documents) to Midhat Mursi is by El-Shukrijumah and not some other Jafar the Pilot. It makes perfect sense that he would be working with Jdey, whether or not they were together in Avon, Colorado.

It was after the “extremely virulent” anthrax was found in Kandahar that, a few days before Christmas 2003, the country returned to “orange” temporarily and brought in the New Year under high alert. Then, in late February 2004, Zawahiri promised another attack on the homeland was coming. This, perhaps overblown (perhaps not) threat was embodied in the dimunitive Adnan G. El-Shukrijumah aka Jafar the Pilot. Jafar the Pilot’s father was the mentor of Ali Al-Timimi’s mentor, Bilal Philips.

Adnan G. El-Shukrijumah was born on August 4, 1975, in Medina, Saudi Arabia to a 16-year-old mother and a 44-year-old Islamic scholar who had headed a mosque in Brooklyn. El-Shukrijumah’s father once translated for the blind sheik. His father, Gilshair, testified as a character witness at a trial of defendants charged with conspiring to blow up New York City landmarks in 1995. He appeared on behalf of Clement Hampton El, who was convicted of plotting to blow up the Holland tunnel and the United Nations. He was the mentor of Bilal Philips who in turn was the mentor of GWU microbiology grad student of Ali Timimi. Adnan’s father had been sent to the Caribbean country of Trinidad and Tobago by the Saudi government as an Islamic missionary. The family lived there until 1983. When his father was transferred to New York City to lead a Brooklyn mosque, the family returned to Saudi Arabia.

Brooklyn had long been important to the infrastructure in the US for obtaining jihadi recruits. Established in the mid-1980s, the Al-Kifah (or Struggle) Refugee Center in New York originally recruited and raised funds for Mujahedeen headed for Afghanistan. In Peshawar, the organization was headed by Mohammed Islambouli, the brother of Anwar Sadat’s assissin. In 1993, the group announced it was switching its operations to Bosnia. These “mujahideen” recruitment centers spread throughout the USA, to places such as Portland, Oregon, which opened a branch in October 1994 — and to Boston where Aafia Siddiqui attended Brandeis and MIT. In the mid-1990s, KSM and Islambouli were given safe haven in Doha, Qatar by the religious minister there. Mohammed Islambouli and his plan to attack using the aircraft and other means was the subject of a December 4, 1998 Presidential Daily Brief that the CIA provided President Clinton.

In 1995, after Adnan had graduated from high school, his father retired from his missionary job as Imam in Brooklyn and the family to Florida, moving the family to Miramar in 1996. The modest retirement home was next door to a small mosque at which the father would preach. For the next two years, Adnan studied computer engineering at Broward Community College, though he did not get a degree. Imam at the mosque next door to his house, Adnan’s Dad often taught at other mosques. One of the mosques he and Adnan would frequent was in Fort Lauderdale — the one across from Franklin Park. It was there that Adnan met Jose Padilla, the ‘’enemy combatant’’ charged in connection with a plot to explode a radioactive bomb in the United States and arrested en route to meet Adham Hassoun, another worshiper at the mosque.

The former imam of that mosque, Awad, confirms El-Shukrijumah and Padilla knew each other. Adnan’s father counseled Padilla’s wife when he left to go to Egypt and she sought a divorce. (When the Padillas were divorced in 2001 Jose Padilla gave an address in Egypt.)

Adnan was responsible at a young age, with his father absent in Brooklyn. The family acknowledges that Adnan had a quick temper. In 1999, Adnan held garage sales and car washes to raise money for Muslim refugees of the war in Bosnia. The fundraising supported Global Relief Fund, which the government has alleged funded terrorist organizations. In May 2001, he went to Saudi Arabia via Trinidad and Panama to sell Islamic goods and trinkets. He didn’t like the permissiveness of American society — he objected to scantily clad women. He wanted to get married. He allegedly was at one or more meetings in the Summer of 2001 in Pakistan at which KSM and Sufaat were present. After 9/11, the FBI began visiting the family home. His mother told him to stay away and not come home. ‘’I tell him we don’t want to know where he is.’’ She said the last she knew he was teaching English in Morocco and had gotten married.

Adnan El Shukrijumah holds a green card but did not become a U.S. citizen. He is still a citizen of Guyana. Saudi Arabia is quite emphatic that he is not a citizen of Saudi Arabia. Officials say he uses a half-dozen aliases and passports, from such countries as Canada, Trinidad and Saudi Arabia.

Not only is he an alleged associate of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed but of Ramzi Binalshibh, another key 9/11 plotter. George Tenet, former CIA Director, noted that Ramzi Yousef had a CBRN role. Apparently, Adnan Shukrijumah accompanied Mohammed Atta and another hijacker in visiting an INS office in Miami in May 2001. The INS employee is 75% sure it was him, having commented to a colleague at the time at how good looking the fellow was.

The Special Branch Trinidad & Tobago Police said they have records that El Shukrijumah was in Trinidad in 2001 and 2002 into 2003. The Express was told: “We have records on him coming and leaving including the fact that he left on a BWIA flight for London in 2001 but on the last occasion he was here we only have records on him coming to Trinidad but none of him leaving.” El Shukrijumah has been associated with the Darul-Uloom Institute, an Islamic institute in Central Trinidad. Part of the problem is that El Shukrijumah has several passports including a Trinidad and Tobago passport and has in the past used several aliases to escape law enforcement agencies. He is known to have Guyanese links. The US authorities also report that he may have been in Canada in 2002 looking for nuclear material for a “dirty bomb.”

US officials found a letter advising Egyptian El-Maati that he had been granted Canadian citizenship and a patient’s card from Toronto General Hospital. His brother, Ahmad Abu-Elmaati, in a written confession, that he now has recanted, described a plan to drive a truck bomb into the Parliament buildings in Ottawa.

In late May 2004, Jafar allegedly was spotted a Tegucigalpa Internet cafe. According to Honduras security official, he made phone calls to France and the United States. The witness, the owner of the cafe, says he was with two other men, “all badly dressed and bearded,” who spoke English and French. Security Minister Oscar Alvarez claimed Shukrijumah was involved in a plot to disrupt shipping in the Panama Canal.

On September 29, 2001, Dr. Alibek — just a matter of feet from the microbiologist working with Bin Laden’s sheik and known to be a Salafist hardliner — was interviewed on the threat of anthrax. Dr. Osterholm, an expert at the University of Minnesota addressed the threat of aerial spraying. (He and his colleagues were a couple miles from where Zacarias Moussaoui in August was found with cropdusting documents on his laptop.)

Might relatively costless, biosecurity precautions served to avoid the need for $50 billion that then was spent to address the threat?

“Mr. ALIBEK: When we talk and deal with, for example, nuclear weapons, it’s not really difficult to count how much of one or another substance we’ve got in the hands. When you talk about biological agents, in this case it’s absolutely impossible to say whether or not something has been stolen.”

ZWERDLING: Alibek and other researchers say they don’t have evidence that scientists actually did steal deadly germs and sell them to terrorists. But when they look at other countries that have produced bio-warfare agents and look at their possible connections to terrorists, it makes them nervous, such as Iraq, Iran, Egypt and North Korea. And forget secret deals. Terrorists might be able to buy some biological warfare agents on the open market.

Until a few years ago, for instance, researchers could order tiny amounts of anthrax through the mail from at least one commercial lab right here in the United States [from American Type Culture Collection, which by 2001 was located partly in George Mason University’s Discovery Hall along with an adjacent building; ATCC co-sponsored Ali’s bioinformatics program and he had access to the ATCC facilities]. The US government has cracked down on that trade, but bio-weapon specialists say people can still buy anthrax from companies in other countries. So let’s suppose that a group of terrorists could get a sample of virulent anthrax***”

Next question: Could they keep those microbes alive and grow enough of them so they could launch a major biological attack? Alibek says it’s not easy. The terrorists would have to maintain all kinds of precise conditions in a laboratory—oxygen levels, the right nutrients. And that means they’d have to hire renegade scientists who know how to do it, or they’d have to learn themselves.

Mr. ALIBEK: Biological weapons—it’s not rocket science. And people with knowledge, more or less sophisticated, they’re able to develop, manufacture and deploy biological weapons.

***

ZWERDLING: Osterholm studies bio-terrorism and public health at the University of Minnesota. He’s worried about new aerosol products which researchers have developed for factories and hospitals. He says unfortunately those inventions are also perfect for spreading diseases.

Mr. OSTERHOLM: Next time you go through a department store and you come near the perfume section, you know how you can smell that for aisles away. Well, that’s a very simplistic model for what an aerosol particle technology device does. Hardly that little spray bottle is a sophisticated weapon, yet we know that with what kinds of things we’ve developed today, you can have devices that can, in fact, take large buildings and fill them with these kinds of sprays that would have infectious disease agents in them.

ZWERDLING: Osterholm says if terrorists use these sprays to spread anthrax, they could potentially kill thousands of people. Anthrax isn’t contagious, but anybody who’s on the site and breathes the germs could get infected.

— “Possibility of bio-terrorism,” National Public Radio, September 29, 2001

The interview above was after the anthrax was mailed but before the first death was diagnosed as due to anthrax. Dr. Alibek then was interviewed on ABC’s Nightline on October 17, 2001. He addresses the question of the access to know-how of former Russian scientists.

KOPPEL: If anyone should know about the potentially sinister uses of anthrax and other biological and chemical agents it’s Ken Alibek. He defected to the United States after two decades overseeing the Soviet Union’s biological weapons program. Thirty thousand people reported to him. And he told Congress that some 7,000 to 9,000 of those have the knowledge to create and disseminate biological agents. Dr. Alibek is with us here in Washington.

And when you talk about those 7,000 to 9,000 people, where are they? What are they doing? Does anybody know?

Mr. KENNETH ALIBEK (President, Hadron Advanced Biosystems): It is very difficult to answer this question. I’m assuming the great majority of them are still in Russia and in some—in some other form of Soviet Union countries. Some of them are in Europe. Some of them in the United States, and then some of them are in some Asian and Middle Eastern countries.

KOPPEL: Do you think some of them have been hired, in effect, as—as contract agents by people who might even be engaging in the kinds of things we’re seeing here in the United States right now?

Mr. ALIBEK: In—in my opinion, it’s—it’s probable.

***

Mr. ALIBEK: In my opinion, there is a solution. Keeping in mind that there are many biological weapons, threat agents, we need to start thinking broadly. And I—in saying this, I mean theoretically, it is possible to develop a broad spectrum defense against biological weapons.
***
KOPPEL: That interview conducted earlier this evening. Dr. Alibek also told us that scientists in the former Soviet Union were working on a defense against biological weapons, and he believes the Russians today would be willing to work jointly with America on such a project. It should also be noted that Alibek’s Virginia company is currently developing the so-called human immune system boosters. Back in a moment.

Dr. Alibek testified before the House Armed Services Committee Oversight Panel on Terrorism on May 23, 2000 about the issue of proliferation of biological weapons.

“Biological weapons are relatively inexpensive and easy to produce. Although the most sophisticated and effective versions require considerable equipment and scientific expertise, primitive versions can be produced in a small area with minimal equipment by someone with limited training.
***
By far, the most effective mode for applying biological weapons is an aerosol cloud. Such a cloud is made up of microscopic particles and is therefore invisible. It can be produced in several ways, most of which involve either an explosion (some type of bomb) or spraying (usually involving a special nozzle on a spray tank). The effectiveness of the cloud is determined by numerous factors, such as the amount of agent that survives the explosion or spraying, and the wind and weather conditions outdoors or air flow and ventilation indoors.”

“The interest of terrorist groups in biological weapons is no surprise. Biological weapons have a number of very attractive features for terrorist uses. Their killing power can approach that of nuclear weapons. They are relatively inexpensive to make. A small-scale biological weapons attack using a common disease organism, such as tularemia or plague, can be masked as a natural outbreak. The effects of a biological weapons attack are not apparent for several days, allowing the perpetrator tune to vanish. The raw material—disease- producing strains of microorganisms—fairly easy to obtain. And the techniques and equipment that are used in ordinary biotechnology research and production can be used for biological weapons.”

Comment:
Ayman in a memo to Atef said the group had become interested in biological weapons only because US officials kept telling the world how easy they were to make.

“Terrorists interested in biological weapons are on the level of state- sponsored terrorist organizations such as that of Osama bin Laden; on the level of large, independent organizations such as Aura Shrinikyo; or on the level of individuals acting alone or in concert with small radical organizations.”

Comment:
Given that Ken has told me he knew Ali was a hardliner — more recently he described Ali as a fanatic — it would seem that GMU should have been aware of the threat of such “individuals acting alone or in conert with small radical organizations” (if not Al Qaeda itself).

Dr. A continued:

“Although these groups will produce biological weapons with varying levels of sophistication, they all can potentially cause great damage. *** Furthermore, there is no doubt that we will see future uses of biological weapons by terrorist groups, as there have been several attempts already.”

***
For terrorist groups, the most likely source of such knowledge would be state-sponsored biological weapons programs, which have the financial and scientific wherewithal to perfect production and deployment techniques. Since the Soviet Union and Russia had the most sophisticated and powerful biological weapons program on earth, the former Soviet states present a particular proliferation threat. The tremendous knowledge amassed by former Soviet scientists would be extremely useful to both military and terrorist organizations.”

Comment:
Given he knows the threat is grave, and his program would be a prime target for infiltration, what steps were taken to ensure that someone not allied with the Salafi-Jihadis and preaching on the signs of the coming day of judgment was not sharing his fax, mail drop and water fountain?

Having worked for Andrew Card once (for two months in 1996 when Mr. Card was Secretary of Transportation), did Ali use Mr. Card as a reference?

Dr. Alibek continued:

“When most people think of proliferation, they imagine weapons export. In the case of biological weapons, they picture international smuggling either of ready-made weapons material, or at least of cultures of pathogenic microorganisms. However, this area of proliferation is of the least concern. Even without such assistance, a determined organization could obtain virulent strains of microorganisms from their natural reservoirs (such as soil or animals), from culture libraries that provide such organisms for research purposes, or by stealing cultures from legitimate laboratories.”

Comment:
American Type Culture Collection co-sponsored Ali’s bioinformatics program. I am told by a former ATCC scientist — the scientist says she/he was terminated for an expressed concern for security — that Ali would have had access to the ATCC patent repository (as distinguished from its less interesting online catalog).

Dr. Alibek continued:

“Given the current economic situation in the states of the former Soviet Union, the incentive to sell equipment and knowledge suitable for biological weapons production without regard to their eventual use is great both for the government and for individual scientists and businessmen. The Russian government has long been short of funds, and its biotechnology arena has also been adversely affected. Many of its scientists are unemployed; those that are employed are paid poorly or not at all Some of them have been forced to turn to other lines of work, such as street vending. It is important for the international community to ensure that these scientists have legitimate, decent- paying work to do in their fields.

The proliferation issue is particularly complex for biological weapons. In many cases, the same equipment and knowledge that can be used to produce biological weapons can also be used to produce legitimate biotechnological products ***”

Dr. Alibek concluded:

“To protect ourselves from the threat of biological weapons, we must increase our awareness and understanding of the threat, strengthen current international agreements and increase transparency ***”

Comment:
ATCC refuses to say whether they had virulent Ames in its patent repository. Dr. Bailey refuses to confirm Ali was not more than 15 feet from both Dr. A and Dr. B.

In testimony dated October 20, 1999, before Ali joined the program at GMU, Dr. A, Chief Scientist at Hadron, Inc testified before the House Armed Services Commitee, Military Procurement Subcommittee and Military Research and Development Subcommittee.

He described the Soviet program:

“In addition to continuing previous types of work (developing improved manufacturing and testing techniques and equipment; developing improved delivery means for existing weapons; and exploring other possible agents as weapons), new emphasis was placed on:

conducting molecular biology and genetic engineering research in order to develop antibiotic-resistant and immunosuppressive strains *** and ***
transforming non-pathogenic microorganisms *** into pathogenic microorganisms.”

Comment:
An inverted plasmid was found in the mailed anthrax. The mailed anthrax was a mixture of two strains. Did someone insert virulent plasmid x101 and x102, rending avirulent Ames (Delta Ames) virulent?

His testimony has a heading:
“PROLIFERATION OF BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS”

Dr. A explains:

“Of course, Russia is not the only biological weapons threat we face. A number of other states are known or suspected to possess biological weapons.

Terrorist groups also present an increasing threat; the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan was working on biological weapons, and Osama bin Laden’s organization apparently has biological weapons as well. The extent of the threat is no surprise.”

That’s right. It is no surprise. So why was a leading Salafist-Jihadi allowed to work in the DARPA-funded program which at its center had the largest biodefense award in history funding a contract involving Delta Ames for USAMRIID? People need to appreciate that Ali Al-Timimi was perhaps the more widely distributed than perhaps any other Salafist preacher. His talk for examples about the fiqh (principles of islamic jurisprudence) as applied to warfare was online and accessible by a simple google search.

On March 3, 1999, before Ayman wrote his memo to Atef about biological weapons, and just a week before before the blind sheik’s lawyer (and detainees on trial) announced that Ayman was going to use weaponized anthrax against US targets, Dr. A, then Program Manager at Battelle Memorial Institute, testified before the House Intelligence Committee.

“POTENTIAL IMPACT OF TERRORIST USE OF BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS
While we should not ignore the continuing threat of military use of biological weapons, we are not at present poised for war with any nation known or suspected to possess biological weapons (with the possible exception of Iraq and few other countries). A more likely threat is that posed by the terrorist use of biological weapons. Terrorist use can occur on the level of state-sponsored terrorism; on the level of a large, independent organization like the Aura Shinrikyo cult in Japan; or on the level of an individual acting alone or in concert with a small organization, such as a militia. For these three typerrorist attack, the expected impact will differ considerably.
There is no doubt, however, that the potential impact is great. A report published by the Centers for Disease Control in April, 1997 evaluated the economic impact of a bioterrorist attack for each of three different biological agents: anthrax, brucellosis, and tularemia. Their model showed that the expected economic impact from suck an attack would range from $477.7 million to $26.2 billion per 100,000 persons exposed. A copy of this report is attached.

Furthermore, there is no doubt that we will see future uses of biological weapons by terrorist groups ***”

“However, my analysis of several recently issued handbooks for military use indicated that there were still a considerable number of substantive inaccuracies. Thus, further revisions are necessary for these handbooks.

In my opinion, these inaccuracies largely stem from lack of knowledge. Since the U.S. stopped all offensive biological weapons research in 1969 and significantly curtailed its defensive research until 1994, U.S. knowledge of biological weapons is obsolete in many respects. Only in the last few years has there been a concerted attempt to “catch up.” We must continue our recently renewed efforts to understand biological weapons and to analyze the actual threat they present.”

Comment:
This turned out to be unfortunate. This way when Ken’s DARPA-funded program was infiltrated by a microbiologist working with Al Qaeda supporters, Bin Laden was sure to have access to cutting edge know-how.”

On May 20, 1998, Dr. A, then Program Manager, Battelle Memorial Institute, testified before the Joint Economic Committee on the subject of “Terrorist and Intelligence Operations: Potential Impact on the U.S. Economy.” It was July 1998 that the laptop of the military commander of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (evidencing Ayman’s interest in weaponizing anthrax) was seized after his capture outside a restaurant in Baku, Azerbaijan.

Ali’s testimony in posts above (from 1999 and 2000) derived from the same draft which very likely will have been used also in earlier testimony. And so Ayman had his testimony as a blueprint early on for use in his planning.

But the irony is especially sharp here given that the title of this testimony is “terrorist and intelligence operations.”

Who was in charge of avoiding infiltration of the DARPA-funded Center for Biodefense at George Mason University? Where is the accountability? The FBI’s failure to bring Amerithrax to a successful conclusion has led to conspiracy theories that have undermined the US in world opinion.

What did the DOJ do? They put a man in charge of the prosecution whose family was very active on Palestinian / terrorism issues and whose daughter now represents Al-Timimi pro bono. Where is the accountability?

There are numerous ways in which Russia’s biological weapons expertise can be proliferated to other countries.”

Comment:
Indeed. Sometimes such proliferation is funded by DARPA and then any student who wants to apply to work in the building can submit an application. Salafist preachers seeing signs of the coming day of judgment and end of times upon an inevitable clash of civilizations — and mentored by the sheik who was the subject of bin laden’s declaration of war in 1996 — are invited to apply. A high security clearance for mathematical support work for the Navy will be thrown in as an added bonus.

Dr. A continues:

“Yet another mode of proliferation is one that appears at first completely innocuous: scientific publications. Certainly, neither the authors nor the journals stand to gain financially from this type of technology transfer. However, considerable information that can at best be considered dual-use in nature can be found in such open publications. For example, a recent article detailed a method for cultivating Marburg virus. This method is so simple, and requires so little equipment and training, that it could easily be adopted by a terrorist group. Other, more sophisticated types of information published include such things as genetic engineering methods, antibiotic resistant strains of pathogenic microorganisms, and so on.”

Comment:
Fortunately, Ed’s discussion of the method of weaponization has been so confused for the past half-decade that he has kept America safe from such proliferation. TrebleRebel, OTOH, perhaps should be deported especially if he still has his afternoon tea.

Dr. A asks:

“WHAT IS THE POTENTIAL IMPACT OF TERRORIST USE OF BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS?

While we should not ignore the continuing threat of military use of biological weapons, we are not at present poised for war with any nation known or suspected to possess biological weapons (with the possible exception of Iraq). A more likely threat is that posed by the terrorist use of biological weapons. Terrorist use can occur on the level of state-sponsored terrorism; on the level of a large, independent organization like the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan; or on the level of an individual acting alone or in concert with a small organization, such as a militia. For these three types of terrorist attack, the expected impact will differ considerably.

There is no doubt, however, that the potential impact is great. A report published by the Centers for Disease Control in April, 1997 evaluated the economic impact of a bioterrorist attack for each of three different biological agents: anthrax, brucellosis, and tularemia. Their model showed that the expected economic impact from such an attack would range from $477.7 million to $26.2 billion per 100,000 persons exposed. A copy of this report is attached.”

“OUR GENERAL PREPAREDNESS FOR MILITARY AND TERRORIST BIOLOGICAL ATTACKS

Fortunately, in the course of the past four or so years, our preparedness for military and terrorist biological attacks has changed considerably for the better. Heightened awareness of the biological threat has lead to a number of positive developments ***”

Comment:
Heightened awareness? I mean, it’s not like Ali was particularly sneaky. He did not shave his beard such as Ayman has advised is useful in covert operations. He did not avoid the mosque as Ayman has advised. While Ali avoided discussing politics or religion at work, his views were widely distributed on the internet. Why was DARPA so eager to spend hundreds of millions on scientific learning and not undertake basic biosecurity precautions at the facilities it funded? Where is the accountability?

Did Ali have some card up his sleeve or behind his back that trumped such considerations? Have you noticed how all the government experts went on to high-paying jobs in similar centers? FBI officials went on to high-paying jobs in the security field? So it is not like they needed to be sure the governmental mission — and the public interest — was accomplished.

For the reasons explained by the former emir of the Egyptian Islamic Group in links posted yesterday, use of WMDs against civilians will send them to eternal damnation.

But it really would behoove the FBI to show it has been successful in thwarting the anthrax threat at least insofar it was manifested in the Fall 2001 anthrax mailings.
Certainly, fear of civil liability should not factor into the equation at all. It’s never the crime as much as the cover-up. GMU’s failure to have anything approaching candor or transparency on these issues does not weigh in its favor. It would not have intruded on the former student’s privacy to say: “Oops. We had inadequate biosecurity protocols in place.”

On July 1, 2005, Dr. Alibek testified before the Committee on House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Prevention of Nuclear and Biological Attack:

“Though the threat of terrorist groups developing genetically engineered pathogens may not be immediate, it is important to recognize that it could be a threat in the future. We must diligently monitor the situation and be on the look out for possible changes in the field that could increase the availability of this technology to terrorist groups so that we can be best prepared for possible bioterrorism attacks involving genetically engineered pathogens.”

Comment:
Sigh. Let’s take care of old business, Ken, before giving Ayman any new ideas.

One of my favorite interviews is Dr. Alibek’s interview on October 19, 2001 on CBS News’ “48 Hours.” It was titled “Deadly intent; how easy it is for the wrong people to get anthrax spores.”

“Dr. ALIBEK: When I was born, it was 1950. The United States was the main enemy of the Soviet Union.
(Footage of Soviet Union-era military parade; vintage photos of Alibek; footage of people placing containers in ground)

MORIARTY: (Voiceover) It was the Cold War. Alibek, then Alibekov, was a young army doctor who turned anthrax and other bacteria and viruses into deadly weapons that were also drug resistant.

Dr. ALIBEK: I did something I should have not done.
(Footage of Alibek talking with man; anthrax letter sent to Tom Brokaw; postmark; Dr. Alibek in his office; World Trade Center site)

MORIARTY: (Voiceover) Today, Dr. Alibek works for the Americans, finding ways to defend against the same weapons. In the case of the letters, while DNA tests will be needed to pinpoint exactly where the anthrax came from, Dr. Alibek suspects they’re connected in some way to the September 11th attacks and the people who planned them.

Dr. ALIBEK: In my opinion, what we see now is the second wave.

Mr. RICHARD SPERTZEL: Clearly, biological weapons was part of the training manual that was used by the Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaida network.
(Footage of Spertzel; airplane; photos of hijackers; footage of crop-dusting planes; apartment building; streets of Prague)

MORIARTY: (Voiceover) According to former UN weapons inspector Richard Spertzel, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the same men who participated in last month’s attacks had interest in biological weapons as well; reports that key hijacker Mohamed Atta inquired about the purchase of a crop-duster; the biowarfare manuals and booklets found in a New Jersey apartment of suspects in custody ***

Mr. SPERTZEL:*** The initial seed material would be a very, very small quantity of that and could be contained in a vial as small as your little finger.
(Footage of lab setting)

MORIARTY: (Voiceover) But the fact is you don’t need Iraq or other foreign sources to obtain a strain of anthrax. The bacteria can be found in our own labs in the US.

***

Dr. ALIBEK: The Soviet Union spent billions and billions to develop these techniques, this production. Now this information is available for the cost of a translator.
(Footage of Soviet Union-era military parade; vintage photo of Soviet scientists)”

Comment: Or perhaps the cost of tuition. (Though, note, Ali beginning January 2002 was paid $70,000 a year).

“Dr. ALIBEK: You can imagine if—if somebody comes to you and says ‘OK, OK, let’s have a deal. I’ll give you $10,000 or $20,000, and the only thing for you to do, to write the procedure. Then you forget me and I’ll forget you.’ Temptation.

MORIARTY: (Voiceover) Underemployed rogue scientists, easily available viruses, contaminated weapon burial grounds. These are warnings that Dr. Alibek has been giving Congress for years. What once seemed like just a scientist’s theory has become America’s reality that can no longer be ignored.”

Comment: Yet, the public and media has ignored the reality of the infiltration that was allowed to happen here for 7 years. Even Ken now ignores it. He will claim, if some reporter is able to contact him, that the FBI suspects someone other than Al-Timimi. (But he can’t tell). Wrong. Although the FBI does not suspect Ali of being the processor or mailer, they suspect he accessed (and stole) the biochemistry information. Tell me: what credibility will those GMU Center for Biodefense threat assessment people have to the extent they continue to be clueless about Al-Timimi?

And let’s not forget that one of Al Qaeda’s charity front was known by the FBI to have clipped a news article reporting on Ken’s threats about the country being unprepared for anthrax.

October 24, 2001 Wednesday

SHOW: THE MONEY GANG

Biological Warfare Analysis, CNNfn

GUESTS: Dr. Kenneth Alibek

***
“ALIBEK: Well, unfortunately, we discussed this issue several years ago and - but at that time, not many people paid attention.”

ALIBEK: In my opinion, it’s not very hard. Again, for many years, it was a great deal of discussion, whether or not it was possible to get portions (ph) and traces as an agent, whether or not it’s difficult to manufacture anthrax biological weapons or substances, whether or not it was difficult to deploy. Unfortunately, now we see it’s not a very big problem. People with some sort of knowledge, some knowledge can do this. ***

KIERNAN: Dr. Kenneth Alibek is president of Advanced Biosystems and he’s joined us from Washington.”

Comment: The FBI, upon regular dumpster diving at a Illinois-based charity found an article by Ken talking about the anthrax threat. So someone was paying attention. Ayman and his supporters were.

“Peter, six months into it, federal investigators say they have few clues and no suspects. But what they do have is a fear that the person responsible could be one of the very scientists they have relied on for help and a concern that the US military is not telling them everything they know about secret anthrax research programs.

(VO) The FBI asked for the help of Dr. Ken Alibek almost immediately because no one in the world has made more weapons-grade anthrax than he has. Until he defected 10 years ago, Alibek ran the secret Soviet anthrax program and says he has the expertise to make the material that was sent in the American anthrax letters.

Dr. KEN ALIBEK: Yes, it would be easy for me.

ROSS: (VO) Now, Alibek tells ABC News he and a number of other scientists were told last month they must take lie detector tests if they want to continue to help the FBI.

And you passed the test?

Dr. ALIBEK: Yes, I did.

ROSS: So they’re concerned that whoever is helping them could, in fact, be the person responsible?

Dr. ALIBEK: I think so.

ROSS: (VO) Federal investigators say Alibek is one of at least a dozen individuals, many who worked in the bioweapons research program at Fort Detrick, Maryland, who have been given and passed lie detector tests.”

Comment: Years ago, when I emailed Dr. Alibek, he said the FBI suspected Ali. It was only after the overbroad FoxNews report, that he told me different. Dr. A and Dr. B at GMU would not in any way be suspected of having been complicitous. Only Ali and his Salafist-Jihadi friends.

In mid-October 2001, he was interviewed by John Gibson of FoxNews and touched on this question of intelligence analysis:

ALIBEK: John, as I said before, the probability that they got anthrax from Iraq is high. But in order to say for sure whether or not it was the case, we need to do some additional study. This study would include some intelligence study by some of our intelligence agencies and some I would say scientific technical study. Unfortunately, I have not been involved in the study, but a lot of information could be obtained even from some preliminary or thorough analysis of this samples.

Comment:
A couple years later Ken told me he knew Ali was a hardliner but didn’t know any details about his charity work. Why not? Why didn’t he and have his numerous assistants make it a point to learn? The mission of the Center for Biodefense included threat assessment. Entire PhD theses are written on the subject.

The tape referred to in the report was made by supporters of al-Qaeda and released May 26, titled ``Nuclear Jihad, The Ultimate Terror,’’ IntelCenter, based in Alexandria, Virginia, said in an e-mailed statement today.

``The material in these types of videos does not qualify as an official message from al-Qaeda or any other group,’’ said IntelCenter, which provides counterterrorism intelligence support to the U.S., British, Australian and Canadian armed forces. ``Considering them so would be the equivalent of considering a 10-year-old’s homemade fan video of his favorite sports team to be an official team message.’’

The page is very detailed, so I may find ways to shorten it. Or I may find that I need to expand upon it -- particularly with additional illustrations. But, for now, I'm putting it out there for comments. I hope that anyone who sees any errors in this new web page will contact me and explain what those errors are so that I can make corrections.

The new web page shows why the article in Science Magazine titled "Anthrax Powder: State Of The Art?" is totally invalid and nothing but a conspiracy theory disguised as a scientific article. It answers the questions posed by other scientific articles, such as the article in Aerosol Science and Technology, and it verifies that any article which claims that anthrax spores must be "weaponized" with a coating of silica before they can cause inhalation anthax or disperse as a deadly aerosol is total nonsense.

Ed, could you list your sources on your webpage in support of the individual statements? Thanks. Your discussion does not square with the literature. (I don’t see the point in your BSing about the science.) If experience is a guide, you haven’t researched the literature.

Disclaimer:
Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual
posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its
management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the
exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.